The recording industry on Thursday won the largest judgment so far against consumers who illegally download music over the Internet when a federal jury ordered a 30-year-old Minnesota woman to pay $222,000 for copyright infringement.
The victory could embolden the industry in its four-year legal campaign against piracy at a time when illegal sharing of music online is exploding and dramatically reducing music sales.
The decision by the jury in a federal district court in Duluth, Minn., against Jammie Thomas, an Indian reservation employee, is the first case of its type to come to trial. The verdict could convince others accused of pirating music to settle their cases.
The Record Industry Assn. of America, which represents the six music labels that brought the case, has brought 26,000 lawsuits against individuals for copying or letting others copy songs online. More than 10,000 of these cases have been settled, with defendants typically paying less than $5,000.
Despite years of litigation by the major record labels since file-sharing computer programs began spreading with the advent of Napster in 1999, illegal downloads are 10 times as common as legal digital sales and are still growing at 60% a year, said Russ Crupnick of market researcher NPD Group.
"The landscape is still very much what it was three or four years ago," said Eric Garland, chief executive of the piracy-tracking firm BigChampagne. "It's still a one-horse race, and piracy is the lead horse."
The Record Industry Assn. said the contest would be even more lopsided if it stopped suing. Most Americans would acknowledge today that sharing music files over the Internet is illegal, reversing poll findings from four years ago.
Thomas became the first of the accused to bring a civil case to trial. The verdict could discourage others like her from taking a chance that the industry couldn't prove they were guilty.
Thomas, a single mother of two, testified this week that she had not used the Kazaa online service for swapping music with strangers. But evidence showed that a Kazaa user named "tereastarr" had offered up 1,700 songs, and that Thomas went by the same name on other online destinations.
In addition, her Internet service provider said it had assigned Thomas the numeric Internet address that on Feb. 21, 2005, had connected to Kazaa.
