Jammie Thomas fined $222,000 for illegal file-sharing

A federal jury in Duluth, Minnesota Thursday ordered a Minneapolis woman to pay $220,000 to six music companies for illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted music over a peer-to-peer network.

The 12 person jury said Jammie Thomas must pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs that were the focus of the case. In their complaint, the six music companies that sued her had claimed that Thomas had illegally shared a total of 1,702 songs over the Kazaa file sharing network, but they chose to focus on a representative list of 24 songs.

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Does this verdict really make any difference? I am sure it is a shock to everyone, but it was not really a big surprise. I felt that Thomas offer some alternative theories doubting the RIAA's allegations she shared illegal songs but did not go into exact detail.

Sure, a victory for the RIAA, but quite a lot of folks are sympathetic to the woman because of her financial situation. In fact, you could probably find worse users sharing several more times than what she had alleged to have done.

Will this stop illegal downloading? No. Today's users are smarter. They are most likely to use bit torrent or other secured file systems to download record albums and songs. They are more likely to offer select access to shared files rather than public access. Of course, how can you prevent a person carrying a 500GB portable hard drive to his or her friend's house and letting that person download everything? How can you stop a person copying a record album onto a blank CD and giving it out to his or her friends?

Even besides file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or Napster, you still got mIRC networks offering DDE downloads, or you can go through the usenet newsgroups and download songs from attachments.