Capitol v. Thomas (previously named
Virgin v. Thomas) was the first
file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit brought by
major record labels to be tried before a jury. The defendant, Jammie Thomas, was found
liable in a 2007 trial for infringing 24 songs and ordered to pay
$222,000 in
statutory damages.
The court later granted her motion for a new trial because of an error in its
jury instructions. In the second trial, in 2009, a jury again found against Thomas, this time awarding $1,920,000 in statutory damages.
Background
Jammie Thomas (born 1977), now Jammie Thomas-Rasset, is a
Native American mother of four from
Brainerd,
Minnesota, and works as a natural resources coordinator for the
Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians.
The RIAA first warned Thomas with a
cease-and-desist letter and settlement offer. Thomas refused to settle, and was then sued by several major record labels for copyright infringement, by unauthorized downloading and "sharing" of 24 sound recordings on
Kazaa, under the user name of
TEREASTARR@KaZaA. The date of the alleged infringement was February 21, 2005. The recordings included songs by such bands as
Aerosmith,
Green Day, and
Guns N' Roses.
Rather than seeking actual damages, the plaintiffs sought relief via
statutory damages, assessed in accordance with .
First trial
The proceedings and trial were held in
Duluth, Minnesota and were presided over by U.S. District Court Judge
Michael J. Davis. Thomas was represented by
Minneapolis attorney Brian Toder.
In the trial, the plaintiffs alleged that on February 21, 2005, Jammie Thomas shared a total of 1,702 tracks online. The plaintiffs, however, sought relief for only 24 of these.
Thomas' legal defense was to claim that she had not shared the files.
[ During the trial, her lawyer suggested her computer could have been under the control of people elsewhere due to "a spoof, a zombie or some other type of hack".]
A hard drive containing the copyrighted songs was never presented at the trial. Thomas turned over to the plaintiffs' attorneys a hard drive that contained neither Kazaa nor the infringing files.
The jury was instructed that merely "making available" sufficed to constitute an infringement of the plaintiffs' distribution right, even without proof of any actual distribution.[ Despite disagreement from the defense, the court proceeded to interpret making available as distribution for purposes of instructing the jury.]
On October 4, 2007, after 5 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict finding her liable for willful infringement, and awarded statutory damages in the amount of $9,250 for each of the 24 songs, for a total of $222,000.Retrial
The judge in Thomas' trial ordered a retrial because recent case law has cast doubt on the theory of "making available" as sufficient for infringement.
In May 2009, during preparation for the retrial, Brian Toder stepped down as Thomas-Rasset's lawyer. Thomas-Rasset then accepted Brian Sibley and Kiwi Camara's offer to defend her pro bono.
The retrial was held on June 15, 2009 under the updated case name Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rassett. In this trial, the jury was instructed to find the owners' copyrights were infringed provided the ownership claims were valid and provided there was an infringement of either the reproduction right (via Thomas-Rassett "downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners") or the distribution right (via Thomas-Rassett "distributing copyrighted sound recordings to other users on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners"). For each song reproduced or distributed, the infringement had to be assessed as willful or non-willful, and damages assessed accordingly. The jury was not allowed to be specific about which rights (distribution or reproduction) were infringed, and unlike in the first trial, the judge didn't attempt to define distribution.
After 5 hours of deliberation, the jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for willful copyright infringement of all the songs, and awarded to the plaintiffs statutory damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per song, out of an allowed range of $750 to $150,000).
On July 6, 2009, Thomas-Rasset filed a motion asserting the statutory damage award was so disproportionate to actual damages as to be unconstitutional, and announcing her intention to appeal two prior court orders permitting the plaintiffs to present certain evidence at trial. The evidence in question includes allegedly incomplete and therefore inadmissible copyright registrations, and evidence collected by MediaSentry which the motion claimed should have been inadmissible because it was collected in violation of state private investigator & wiretap statutes. The motion called for either a retrial with that evidence suppressed, a reduction of damages to the statutory minimum ($750 per song; $18,000 total), or a removal of statutory damages altogether.
The same day, the plaintiffs filed a motion asking for an injunction against Thomas-Rasset which would require her to destroy all infringing sound recordings on her computer, and desist from any further infringement of their copyrights. Their motion claims trial evidence established that Thomas-Rassett "was distributing 1,702 sound recordings…to millions of other users" and that the plaintiffs would face "great and irreparable harm" if she were to continue to infringe upon their copyrights.The 24 songs
See also
