Two years ago, Jamie Thomas-Rasset went to trial and was ordered to pay $222,000 by a different jury for pirating
24 songs. The judge in the first case declared a mistrial because of some juror mistake. Instead of settling like the 30,000-plus others the RIAA has sued or threatened to sue for copyright infringement, Thomas-Rasset opted for a new trial . In the previous trial, she testified a file-sharing hack or crack hijacked her WiFi connection, even though she didn’t have a WiFi router. This time, she testified that her children might have used her computer to file share on Kazaa. The new Minneapolis jury didn’t buy her latest version of events and she was found guilty and fined $80,000 a track (
1.9 MILLIE) Under the Copyright Act, juries can award damages of up to $150,000 per pilfered track. About $3,500 is the average payment in the thousands of RIAA cases that settled out of court.
