A federal-court jury on Thursday found a Minnesota woman infringed on copyrighted material by sharing music files over the Internet in the first such case to go to trial.

Jammie Thomas had been sued by six record companies in U.S. District Court in Duluth, Minn., in 2006 for sharing songs by artists such as Destiny's Child and Green Day via the popular online service Kazaa.

A jury on Thursday ordered Thomas to pay $9,250 for each of 24 of those songs, for a total of $222,000, according to court filings.

said by howrman :

The "loss" of the hard drive is very bad for the defendant. It allows the jury to infer that she destroyed the hard drive because it contained incriminating evidence. That helps the RIAA establish liability and, perhaps more importantly, it makes the defendant look bad to the jury. Moreover, the story about Best Buy replacing the drive without the defendant's permission shortly after she received a letter from the RIAA just doesn't ring true to me. As a result, my guess is that, this case may make some good law for the RIAA.

said by howrman :

It's very easy to figure out when a hard drive has been formatted/installed.

said by Ahrenl :

It's absolutely a civil case. First and foremost, there is no criminal copyright law. Secondly, the RIAA is bringing the case, only the government can bring a criminal case. You can't criminally charge someone else, you have to have the DA do it.

Finally, I'm sure the RIAA has some vague IP sniffer data that nobody on the jury will understand, that the defendants lawyer will have to try and debunk. That will most certainly result in that glased eye look you get from the majority of people when you mention any type of computer process.

The icing for the RIAA is that they can blame failure on the "suspicious" disappearence of the defandants HD. So they don't have to worry about creating negative case law.

said by woody7 :

you could change your own drive and who would know.