$222,000 for 24 songs.

A woman by the name of Jammie Thomas is now $222,000 poorer. Six different record companies for illegally downloading songs, and making them available to people on Kazaa recently sued Thomas. Jammie Thomas is a mother of two and makes $36,000 a year working for a local band in her area. Therefore, this price she had to pay was not an easy one. Although $222,000 seems like a lot of money just for 24 songs, some people would consider Thomas lucky seeing how many jurors wanted her to have to pay the maximum amount of $3.6 million. The law allowed the record companies to be awarded anywhere from $750 and $150,000 for each song, Thomas is only having to pay $9,250.

Thomas' attorney, Brian Toder, was quick to argue with judge Lisa Reinke about how the "size of the verdict is out of proportion to the offense", seeing how Thomas could have easily bought each individual song online for 99 cents. The problem was not that Thomas bought them illegally online; it was that she made them available for other users of Kazaa. How the jury was able to come up with price that Thomas would have to pay is, they each wrote on a piece of paper the amount that they think she should pay and then passed their prices in and eventually an agreeable price was settled on. Judge Reinke really had no idea on how much Thomas should have paid but she knew that it had to be a reasonable amount because it needed to prove a point to file sharers that you can’t steal music offline and get away with it. Reinke said if “you go too low, it’s not going to stop the illegal downloading of music”, “people are going to think, ‘I could do this, I could go through Federal court and get off cheap”. Throughout the 4 ½ hour deliberation over the price, Reinke said she found herself feeling bad for Thomas, but she knew that she could not let her emotions get in the way of her job, after all, she is a judge and it was her duty to make the decision.

In the end, Thomas had to pay her fees to the recording companies, EMI Group PLC’s Capital Records Inc.; The Arista Records LLC label and its parent Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is run by Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG; Vivendi SA’s UMG Inc. and its label, Interscope records; and Warner Bros. Records Inc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/10/AR2007101002253.html