Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Judge Declares Mistrial in Jammie Thomas Trial

David Kravets writes on Threat Level:

A federal judge on Wednesday set aside the nation's first and only federal jury verdict against a peer-to-peer file sharer for distributing copyrighted music on a peer-to-peer network without the labels' authorization.

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Duluth, Minnesota, declared a mistrial in the case of Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota mother of three dinged $222,000 by a federal jury last year for copyright infringement -- $9,250 for each of the 24 infringing music tracks she made publicly available on the Kazaa file sharing network.

Davis' decision means the Recording Industry Association of America's five-year copyright infringement litigation campaign has never been successful at trial.

Most of the 30,000 cases have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars and have never broached the hot-button legal issue that prompted Davis to declare a mistrial.

More here.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home