Round 2: Retrial for Woman Fined in Piracy Case Set to Begin
The retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota woman who was ordered to pay six record companies $222,000 in damages for music piracy, is set to begin Monday in federal district court in Duluth.
Fri, June 12, 2009
Computerworld — The retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota woman who was ordered to pay six record companies $222,000 in damages for music piracy, is set to begin Monday in federal district court in Duluth.
As with the first trial, the new one is shaping to be a contentious battle, with Thomas' new attorney challenging some fundamental assertions made by the music labels and the latter spiritedly defending them in a flurry of pre-trail motions by both sides.
Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of copyright infringement by a jury in October 2007 and ordered to pay $9,250 for each of 24 songs that the music companies said she illegally downloaded and shared with others on a peer-to-peer file sharing network. In their lawsuit, the six music companies claimed that Thomas-Rasset had illegally distributed 1,702 copyrighted songs, though they chose to focus only on a representative sample of 24.
The verdict was overturned last September by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, the same judge who presided over Thomas-Rasset's trial. In ordering a new trial Davis said his jury instructions had been unclear about whether making music available for download by itself constituted infringement. In his ruling, Davis said that under the U.S. Copyright Act and other relevant statues, illegal distribution can only happen when there is actual dissemination of music. Simply making music available for distribution on a computer is not the same as actual distribution, Davis wrote.
During the retrial, Thomas' new attorneys, K.A.D. Camara and Joe Sibley, of Houston-based Camara & Sibley LLP, plan to challenge the RIAA on two fronts. Camara and Sibley are Harvard Law school graduates who agreed to work on the case for free.
In pre-trail motions filed earlier this month, they asked the court to require the RIAA to submit certified copyright registrations for each of the songs that was supposed to have been illegally distributed. They claimed that the copyright registrations offered in the previous trial were not officially enough to prove ownership of the allegedly pirated music. The lawyers also asked the court to suppress evidence against Thomas-Rasset gathered for the RIAA by MediaSentry Inc. In a June 1 motion, Camara argued that the evidence collected by MediaSentry was illegally obtained and in criminal violation of federal and state wiretap acts and Minnesota's Private Detectives Act.
The complaint echoed questions by several others over the past year alleging that MediaSentry essentially operated as a private detective without the requisite state licenses -- a criminal offense in many states.
