2mil File Sharing Judgment Slashed

In 2007, Jaimme Thomas was found guilty of copyright infringement and ordered to pay a whopping $222,0009(US) fine. That's like $1.3 Million (US) in today's money ;-)

Mrs. Thomas' defensive arguments were quite possibly the lamest in the history of defense; She claimed to have no idea it was happening and blamed it on her wireless router being open. This argument fell through as soon as the prosecution showed that the files were shared using her favorite username using Kazaa.

Soon after the judgment, Mrs. Thomas was granted a re-trial due to an error in instructions given to the jury. The second trial was Big Fail when compared to the earlier Lil' Whoops. The defendant was ordered to instead pay $1.92 Million (US), which means that (without taking inflation into consideration) Mrs. Thomas would be forced to pay $1.00 (US) a day for the next 2 million days, or 5,618 years. Assuming she lived that long.

Today we learned that her judgment has been slashed to a much more reasonable amount of $54,000 (US). For sharing 24 songs. Okay, so Capitol Records was only prosecuting for 24 of the over 1,000 songs she shared. That was awful nice of them, right?

Assuming they actually see any of the $54,000 from Mrs. Thomas (in the US you can't declare court judgments as part of a bankruptcy), that should pay for the first two hours of the trial.

The RIAA claims that it's not about the money, it's all about teaching people that it's wrong to steal music. Also that the makers of Kazaa are a bunch of backstabbing ass-kissers who rolled over the first time anyone threatened them with possible legal action.

It looks as if the Intraweb is quickly becoming a hostile environment for those folks with 2.3 million BFFs who asked for a copy of The Rolling Stone's "Satisfaction".

When Capitol vs Thomas began, most of us pirates were ecstatic that someone would finally stand up to the behemoth and prove once and for all that file sharing itself is not illegal or even morally questionable. We were all sitting around our favorite forums and speculating on the hundreds of ingenious arguments that Mrs. Thomas' legal team would come up with.

Needless to say, we were all stunned when we discovered that the jury was made up of the only twelve people in the entire United States who had never heard of a router, let alone a wireless one. Then, to make things worse, we were further stunned when the copyright laws that were designed to protect the public from fakes (check wikipedia for "The real McCoy") was turned against the consumers it was designed by and for.

Today, the music industry is in for some bad times ahead. Sales are down and people are losing their jobs. The RIAA blames it on file sharers, since they believe that most of the world is busy stealing their music instead of buying it. If only they realized that this is actually a by-product of their attack on the very hand that feeds them, perhaps they could turn this thing around before it destroys the Internet.

Mrs. Thomas has declared her intention to continue to appeal, hoping to get the judgment down to a reasonable amount. Perhaps two or three packs of Depends for the RIAA board might do the trick.