June 19, 2009
Music Labels Win $2 Million in Web Case
The Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, and other record labels were awarded $1.92 million on Thursday in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of swapping music over the Kazaa Internet service. Bloomberg reports.
The federal jury in Minneapolis said the woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd, should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs that were posted on the site so others could download them.
The first time the case went to trial, in 2007, a jury awarded $9,250 a song, or $222,000.
The Recording Industry Association of America brought more than 35,000 legal actions against people it claimed were illegally sharing music before changing its policy in December. This is the only case that has gone to trial.
Judge Michael J. Davis of United States District Court threw out the first verdict, saying he had given the jury incorrect instructions.
After the verdict, Ms. Thomas-Rasset, a natural resources coordinator for the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe, said she was disappointed that she had not been able to convince the jury that she had not posted the songs. “The only thing I can say is good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
“The disproportionate size of the verdict raises constitutional questions,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the consumer group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has criticized the music industry’s tactics.
At the four-day trial, lawyers for Ms. Thomas-Rasset argued that the labels could not prove that she had posted the songs on the Kazaa file-sharing site.
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