Woman fined for music downloading may get new trial

A Minnesota woman ordered to pay $222,000 US in the first music-download trial in the United States 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.

The recording industry has sued thousands of people who shared music online.

It has argued that all it must prove is that the defendant made the music available. Recording industry representatives have compared it to someone displaying pirated DVDs for sale on a table.

Music-sharers, however, have argued that the only proved downloaders of their music were investigators working for the record companies themselves.

That was the case in the trial last fall of Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn. Jurors ordered her to pay $222,000, which works out to$9,250 for each of the 24 songs record companies brought up in her trial.

Fine unpaid

The original lawsuit accused her of offering 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network.

Thomas has not yet had to pay whilethe verdicthas been on appeal, her attorney, Brian Toder, said on Thursday.

Judge Michael Davis at the time instructed jurors that making sound recordings available without permission violates record company copyrights "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

But on Thursday Davis said that may have been a mistake.

He wrote that he found a 1993 ruling covering Minnesota that said infringement requires "an actual dissemination of either copies or phonorecords."

Record company attorney Richard Gabriel said even if the companies have to prove downloading occurred, it should suffice to show downloading by investigators working for the record companies.

Rulings differ in U.S. courts

He said they also proved at the trial that Thomas violated the copyright because the files on her computer bore the signatures of online music pirates.

Thomas claimed the music came from her own CDs.

"If we have to retry the case, we will do so without hesitation," Gabriel said.

Record companies have sued at least 30,000 people for distributing music online. Some cases have been dismissed, and many defendants settledby payinga few thousand dollars.

The question of how much the record companies have to prove to win their case came up just before it went to the jury on Oct. 4.

Davis decided the issue from the bench, siding with the jury instruction favoured by the record companies.

On Thursday, Davis wrote that neither side presented the 1993 decision to him.

And he noted that one of the rulings in another case from Arizona, which the record companies used to support their side, was vacated on April 29.

Oral arguments on the question of a new trial are planned for July 1 in Duluth, where the trial was held.

Across the United States, different judges have ruled in different ways on the matter.

Last month a federal judge at a pretrial ruling in Boston said that merely making the songs available online is not copyright infringement. But a ruling by a New York judge took the opposite position.