A trial underway in the U.S. district court in Duluth, Minn. marks the first time that the recording industry will have to go before a jury in their attempt to crack down on piracy. The Recording Industry Association of America has sued 26,000 people in recent years, and all of them were either dismissed or settled out of court – and pretty much all were resolved in favor of the recording industry. Now Jammie Thomas, a single mother living in Brainerd, Minn., will become the first person to throw down with the RIAA in front of a jury of her peers, in Virgin Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas.
The basic background on the case is that Thomas is accused of using KaZaA to trade 1,702 songs under the username "tereastarr." She was caught after distributing 26 songs to SafeNet, the RIAA's anti-piracy contractor that lurks on sites like these to catch pirates. Those 26 songs are copyrighted by the RIAA, which tracked them back to her via her IP address and her MySpace username, which is also "tereastarr." Thomas maintains that she "didn't do this," and regardless, she replaced her hard drive a few years ago, so the physical evidence is lacking. But the crux of her argument in court will be that the copyright owners of many of the songs she is accused of trading cited in the RIAA's court documents are not the same owners cited in songs' certificates of registration. Therefore, they argue, there isn't sufficient evidence that Thomas infringed upon any copyrights.
The court has already ruled that documents the industry tried to introduce to validate their claims to the copyrights were submitted too late, which means record companies probably won't be able to prove that they own the labels that filed the original copyright notice. And while they're arguing on what amounts to a technicality, as Jon Healy points out, "so is the exclusionary rule."
So the record industry will at last be forced to validate their methods of prosecuting pirates before a jury, who will be weighing in, for the first time, on the legality of file trading on the internet. Of course there will also be considering whether the fines -- up to $30,000 per song -- levied against copyright infringers are justified. Thomas makes an interesting poster woman for the issue, as a 30-year-old mother of two who also happens to buy a lot of music from these record companies. Will a jury condone fining her more than $1 million for trading some Guns N' Roses and Vanessa Williams songs on KaZaA?
On the first day of testimony yesterday, the industry didn't do a very good job of making themselves seem reasonable. Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, told the jury that copying even music you paid for – as in, say, uploading it to your MP3 player or adding it to your iTunes playlist – qualifies as "stealing." "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song," Pariser testified.
I'm sure that sort of argument will go over big with the jury.
--Kate Sheppard
