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Legal
Jammie Thomas case to return to court
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 8 July 2010
As expected, the Recording Industry Association Of America will return to court in a bid to finally conclude one of its longest running bits of sue-the-fans file-sharing litigation.
As previously reported, a lot, single mother Jamie Thomas was one of the few people to fight an RIAA file-sharing lawsuit, but she lost. A court initially ordered her to pay $222,000 in damages to the record industry. After a second trial this went up to $1.92 million, but a judge later slashed the figure to a much more modest $54,000. Since then the RIAA have actually offered to settle for the even lower amount of $25,000, but Team Thomas knocked the offer back.
Last month a Minnesota judge appointed an arbitrator to try and help the two sides reach an out of court settlement, but that hasn’t been achieved. Confirming more court time would be required, the two sides in the dispute filed a joint motion with the judge on Monday that read: “As the court is aware, the parties have repeatedly attempted to settle this case, both on their own accord and by order of the Court. Those efforts have, unfortunately, been fruitless because of the substantially divergent views of the parties regarding copyright law and the merits of this case”.
It is not clear how soon the case will now take to get back to the courtroom. When it does, only damages will be discussed. Thomas’s guilt of copyright infringement will remain a given.
