Last September, Minnesota woman Jammie Thomas was convicted of sharing 24 unauthorized tracks via P2P and was told to pay the RIAA $220,000 in damages. Thomas was granted a retrial however, and the case went to verdict again in June.
Thomas was found to have “committed willful violation” of the copyrights on all 24 songs and the jury awarded the RIAA and the media companies $1.92 million USD, equivalent to $80,000 for each song.
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice has called the gigantic fine constitutional, and acceptable.
The legal brief, via Cnet, says: “Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed.”
Prosecutors, during the case, made sure to note that current intellectual property laws allow copyright holders to sue for up to $150,000 USD per work “stolen.”
Result for: retrial
Last September, Minnesota woman Jammie Thomas was convicted of sharing 24 unauthorized tracks via P2P and was told to pay the RIAA $220,000 in damages. Thomas was granted a retrial however, which has gone to verdict today.
Thomas was found to have “committed willful violation” of the copyrights on the 24 songs and the jury has this time awarded the RIAA and the media companies $1.92 million USD, equivalent to $80,000 for each song.
The defendant had been given a retrial because a judge in the original case admitted to making an error in jury instructions.
The new outcome is substantially worse for Thomas, as the penalty now stands $1.92 million compared to the original $220,000 fine.
Result for: retrial
The four men sentenced to a year in prison and fined $3.6 million after being found guilty of assisting copyright infringement should be given a new trial because the Judge was biased, a court heard on Monday. The lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, one of the four founders of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker, said that Judge Tomas Norstrom’s affiliation with groups for copyright protection should have disqualified him.
“Tomas Norstrom was biased during the trial … Secondly, he neglected to inform the defendants and their lawyers of the facts that constituted the bias,” defense lawyer Per Samuelson said in the document, obtained by Reuters. The court of appeal now must decide whether to send the case back to District Court.
Judge Norstrom is a member of The Swedish Association for Copyright and a board member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. Peter Danowsky, A board member of The Swedish Association for Copyright, represented the film and music industries in the trial. Lundstrom’s lawyer last week filed an appeal, asking the court of appeal to change the verdict and dismiss the prosecution and the claims for compensation
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He also said the court should turn to the European court of justice (ECJ) for a preliminary ruling.
