Analysis: $1.92M fine in music piracy case could hurt RIAA

The massive $1.9 million fine imposed by a federal jury yesterday in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of pirating 24 songs may could end up hurting the Recording Industry Association of America's anti-piracy campaign more than anything else, a leading copyright lawyer said.

That's because the sheer size of the verdict hammers home just how unreasonable the RIAA's damages theory for copyright infringement is, said Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who has represented clients facing piracy lawsuits.

"Oddly, this gigantic verdict may do more to hurt than help the RIAA, because it offers a vivid demonstration of how out of synch the RIAA's damages theory is with decades of case law about the reasonableness requirement for copyright statutory damages," Beckerman said.

The size of the award also goes against a century of case law "deeming punitive awards unconstitutional if they are unreasonably disproportionate to the actual damages sustained," he said. He said he has "no doubt" the verdict will be set aside by the trial judge.

A federal jury in Duluth, Minn. on Thursday ordered Jammie Thomas-Rasset to pay six music companies $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she is accused of illegally distributing over the Kazaa 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 laws she was charged with violating allow for maximum damages of up to $150,000 per infringed song. The jury verdict came after a brief four-day retrial in which Thomas-Rasset's new lawyers unsuccessfully tried to bar the evidence gathered against her but offered little else that was different from the first trial.

Yesterday's award is nearly nine times the $222,000 fine Thomas-Rasset was hit with in her first trial by another jury that found her guilty of illegally sharing the 24 songs over a P2P network. That verdict, in October 2007, was overturned last September by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis on technical grounds. Davis is the same judge who presided over Thomas-Rasset's first trial.

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