The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a jury's conclusion that infamous file-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset pay the recording industry $222,000 for downloading and sharing two dozen copyrighted songs on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa.
Without comment, the justices declined (.pdf) to review a petition from the Minnesota woman who claimed the damages award was unconstitutionally excessive and was not rationally related to the harm she caused the music labels. Thomas-Rasset was the nation's first file-sharer to challenge a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit, one of thousands the industry lodged against individuals who illegally shared music on peer-to-peer networks.
The high court's move ends a legal saga that dates to 2007. The litigation had a tortuous history involving a mistrial and three separate verdicts for the same offense — $222,000, $1.92 million and $1.5 million.
The Supreme Court has never heard an RIAA file-sharing case and has previously declined the two other file-sharing cases brought before it.
In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Thomas-Rasset argued that the Copyright Act, which allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, is unconstitutionally excessive. The President Barack Obama administration had weighed in on the case, and urged the justices to reject the challenge because of "Congress' considered judgement that her infringement should be subject to significant statutory damages." (.pdf)
The only other file-sharer to challenge an RIAA lawsuit at trial was Joel Tenenbaum, a Massachusetts college student, whose case followed Thomas-Rasset's. The Supreme Court declined, without comment, to hear his case in May, however, letting stand a Boston federal jury’s award of $675,000 against him for sharing 30 songs.
In the third RIAA file-sharing case against an individual to go before the Supreme Court's justices, the high court had declined to review a petition that would have tested the so-called "innocent infringer" defense to copyright infringement.
Generally, an innocent infringer is someone who does not know she or he is committing copyright infringement. Such downloaders get a $200 innocent-infringer fine per violation.
Most of the thousands of RIAA file-sharing cases against individuals have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. In 2008, the RIAA ceased a five-year campaign it had launched to sue individual file sharers and, with the Motion Picture Association of America, has since convinced internet service providers to begin taking punitive action against copyright scofflaws.
Thomas-Rasset said she won't pay the judgement.
"As I've said from the beginning, I do not have now, nor do I anticipate in the future, having $220,000 to pay this," she said in an e-mail. "If they do decide to try and collect, I will file for bankruptcy as I have no other option." As far as the Supreme Court's action in her case Monday, she said, "it is what it is."
