Woman Who Lost File-Sharing Trial May Get New Trial
“A Minnesota woman ordered to pay $222,000 in the nation’s first music download trial may get another chance with a jury. The issue is whether record companies have to prove anyone else actually downloaded their copyrighted songs, or whether it’s enough to argue that a defendant made copyrighted music available for copying…
Record companies have sued at least 30,000 people for distributing music online. Some cases have been dismissed, and many defendants settled for a few thousand dollars. Thomas, who makes $36,000 a year working for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, was the first to take the record companies all the way to a trial.
Jurors ordered her to pay $222,000, which was $9,250 for each of the 24 songs record companies brought up in her trial. The original lawsuit accused her of offering 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network.”
This is the same issue as the one mentioned in a previous post: is merely making something available for downloading enough to be considered a copyright infringement, or does actual downloading have to take place?
Nitpicking? Not at all. Museums make available all the time. It’s our mission. Substitute the word “copying” for the word “downloading” and you’ll get my drift.
At any rate, a re-trial is very much in order because of the $9,250-per-song damages sought and awarded. If one of the record companies wanted to license an image from our museum for an album cover, they would balk at paying us a couple of hundred bucks.
