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| Huge fine for music downloader |
| A court in the US has ordered a woman to pay $222,000 (£109,000) in damages for illegally file-sharing music
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 5-October-2007
10:15:27 AM |
| The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay for offering to share 24 specific songs online - a cost of $9,250 per song.
Record companies said she had illegally shared a total of 1,702 songs.
Ms Thomas, who denied the charges, was the first person accused of illegal file-sharing who decided to fight the case in court.
Each year, millions of households illegally share music files, and the music industry takes it as a serious threat to its revenue.
About 26,000 lawsuits have been filed against alleged file-sharers, but most defendants settle privately by paying damages amounting to a few thousand dollars.
Industry defiant
However, contesting the charge and losing will cost Jammie Thomas almost a quarter of a million dollars.
Her lawyer, Brian Toder, told the Associated Press that Ms Thomas was reduced to tears by the verdict.
"This is a girl that lives from pay cheque to pay cheque, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her pay cheque garnished for the rest of her life," he said.
The US record industry said investigators located an individual with the screen name "tereastarr@KaZaA", using the Kazaa file-sharing software program.
"This individual was downloading copyrighted sounds recordings from other users of the Kazaa network, and was distributing copyrighted sound recordings stored on her computer to other Kazaa users," the plaintiffs said.
A spokesman for the record companies said he hoped people would understand the verdict.
Richard Gabriel, a lawyer for the music companies, said the verdict was important.
"This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not okay," he told AP
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