The recording industry won a key fight Thursday against illegal music downloading when a U.S. federal jury ordered a Minnesota woman to pay $222,000 US for sharing copyrighted music online.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 30, to pay the six record companies that sued her $9,250 US for each of 24 songs they focused on in the case. They had alleged she shared 1,702 songs online in violation of their copyrights.

Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn., left, was sued $9,250 US for each of 24 songs in a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit.
(Julia Cheng/Associated Press)

"She was in tears. She's devastated," said Thomas's attorney, Brian Toder. "This is a girl that lives from paycheque to paycheque, and now all of a sudden she could get a quarter of her paycheque garnished for the rest of her life."

"This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK," said Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies.

He said no decision had yet been made about what the record companies would do, if anything, to collect the money from Thomas.

Toder said the plaintiff's attorney fees are automatically awarded in such judgments under copyright law, meaning Thomas could actually owe as much as half a million dollars. However, he said he suspected the record companies "will probably be people we can deal with."

Jurors left without commenting.

In the first such lawsuit to go to trial, the record companies accused Thomas of downloading the songs without permission and offering them online through a Kazaa file-sharing account. Thomas denied wrongdoing and testified that she didn't have a Kazaa account.

Record companies have filed some 26,000 lawsuits since 2003 over file-sharing, which has hurt their sales because it allows people to get music for free instead of paying for recordings in stores. Many other defendants have settled by paying the companies a few thousand dollars.

The RIAA says the lawsuits have mitigated illegal sharing, even though music file-sharing is rising overall. The group says the number of households that have used file-sharing programs to download music has risen from 6.9 million monthly in April 2003, before the lawsuits began, to 7.8 million in March 2007.

During the three-day trial, the record companies presented evidence they said showed the copyrighted songs were offered by a Kazaa user under the name "tereastarr." Their witnesses, including officials from an internet provider and a security firm, testified that the internet address used by "tereastarr" belonged to Thomas.

Toder said in his closing that the companies never proved "Jammie Thomas, a human being, got on her keyboard and sent out these things."

"We don't know what happened," Toder told jurors. "All we know is that Jammie Thomas didn't do this."

Companies' lawyer calls for deterrence

Gabriel called that defence "misdirection, red herrings, smoke and mirrors."

He told jurors a verdict against Thomas would send a message to other illegal downloaders.

"I only ask that you consider that the need for deterrence here is great," he said.

U.S. copyright law sets a damage range of $750 to $30,000 per infringement, or up to $150,000 if the violation was "wilful." Jurors ruled that Thomas's infringement was wilful but awarded damages of $9,250 per song; Gabriel said they did not explain to attorneys afterward how they reached that amount.

Thomas, of Brainerd, works for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe's department of natural resources.

Before the verdict, an official with an industry trade group said he was surprised it had taken so long for one of the industry's lawsuits against individual downloaders to come to trial.

Illegal downloads have "become business as usual. Nobody really thinks about it," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which co-ordinates the lawsuits.

"This case has put it back in the news. Win or lose, people will understand that we are out there trying to protect our rights."

Thomas replaced hard drive

Thomas's testimony was complicated by the fact that she had replaced her computer's hard drive after the sharing was alleged to have taken place — and later than she said in a deposition before trial.

The hard drive in question was not presented at trial by either party.

Record companies said Thomas was sent an instant message in February 2005, warning her that she was violating copyright law.

Her hard drive was replaced the following month, not in 2004, as she said in the deposition.

"I don't think the jury believed my client regarding the events concerning the replacement of the hard drive," Toder said.

The record companies involved in the lawsuit are Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.