Damages in Thomas-Rasset File-Sharing Case Back to $222,000
Jammie Thomas-Rasset is back to square one.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit rules that the 34-year-old is guilty of having lied about illegally uploading music and will have to pay $222,000 in damages to the RIAA.
Thomas-Rasset's case has first the headlines in 2007, when (then single mom) Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $222,000 in statutory damages for illegally uploading 24 files. Thomas previously had declined a $5,000 settlement offer. She was granted a re-trial, and received a $25,000 settlement offer and ordered to pay $1,920,000, or $80,000 per song, in that trial. The sum was then reduced to $54,000, which the RIAA declined and was awarded $1.5 million in a third trial. This amount was reduced again to $54,000, while the Court of Appeals now reinstated the original $222,000 judgment.
There is no reason to believe that this battle is over as Thomas-Rasset's attorneys said that they will be fighting all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the unreasonable awards are targeted to punish organized crime, not individual persons.

A fine should only be as large as one can afford to pay back.
Seriously.. Who the fuuu ruins somebody's life for reasons of sharing someone's work.
If someone distributed one of my songs and I lost $100,000 who cares. I would still be sitting on millions.
It's not like I would be poor, and if I had to take action I would fine according to their income (50k a year income, I would fine possibly 5-10k to give them a nasty slap).
1.9M is NOT a reasonable amount.
the punishment is worse than murdering another person... got to love how laws work.
A fine should only be as large as one can afford to pay back.
Seriously.. Who the fuuu ruins somebody's life for reasons of sharing someone's work.
If someone distributed one of my songs and I lost $100,000 who cares. I would still be sitting on millions.
It's not like I would be poor, and if I had to take action I would fine according to their income (50k a year income, I would fine possibly 5-10k to give them a nasty slap).
1.9M is NOT a reasonable amount.
the punishment is worse than murdering another person... got to love how laws work.
Copyright infringement cases should just be settled by making the person pay for the stuff he or she pirated. You wouldn't sue somebody for millions if they took a CD from a music store; don't do that shit to people who downloaded it.
When they attorneys for both sides are finally out of appeals and PR opportunities she will file for bankruptcy and have everything discharged.
Fudge the RIAA ! They are just trying to protect an outdated business model.
It is time to come up with a system that give a fair share to the artists instead of some fat cats in the studios !
24 files (say music) would be worth maybe $0.99 each, call it $25 for 24 files. It would mean over 8880 people would have had to have downloaded the file from her to justify this money. Can they prove that? If they could surely these other people would be in the dock too?
This type of law encourages people to hate RIAA and take up piracy just to get at them!
There's much more in the world than just RIAA and Hollywood content and that's why they declared war to every means of learning it. They want their audience tied to them through ignorance and threats.
Congressman should keep their eyes open for turning people into sheep was never the ideal of the founders of the USA.
If Riaa labels think their goods is at such a high premium that sharing a few songs proportionally should ruin a persons life - Screw them!
Wiping out a 34 year old woman's entire life savings, which is not so easy to make up at 34.
@joytech22. Based on dealing with as many people over many years as I have; forgive me if I don’t believe you are as altruistic as you attribute to yourself.
The fine does sound unreasonable but perhaps I don’t know all the facts.
That said, still.. 222,000 is waaaayyy too much, let alone 1.5 Million!! That judge deserves to be fired for thinking that 1.5 Million was even remotely fair.
The punishment in this woman's case, $222,000, is obtuse; if you assume that she has enough free time in her life to earn an additional $8,880 per year (~20 hrs / wk at $8), then the punishment is roughly equivalent to about 25 years' worth of slave labor (albeit with reasonable working conditions). That's a pretty harsh punishment.
Regardless, I don't condone piracy. Publishing someone else's work - whether for personal gain or for free - is wrong. If I spent a year working on something to try to earn money to survive, and someone else took that work and stripped the value out of it, that would cause real physical harm.
I agree, except the fat cats aren't in the studios. Engineers in virtually all studios are hardly getting by. The fat cats are in the record labels.
Did she actually sell them? If not, are they "estimating" how much "damage" she caused? Does that even sound reasonable? If someone throws a basketball into a flower bed, then the $ amount can be determined based on fair market value, although it may be an "estimate" due to fluctuating prices. It seems absurd to come up with an amount to fine an individual using "what could have happened" as the basis--unless you are trying to "get someone back" or "teach them a lesson." Also, the amount of sales lost is not the damage; at most it would be the amount of profit lost. (At some point, and it seems a far cry from $220K, it becomes "cruel and unusual punishment," and isn't "getting someone back" cruelty?) The whole thing seems like a perversion of justice.