Court orders Jammie Thomas to pay RIAA $1.92 million
Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 17 June 2009
In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of stealing.
In 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America claimed in a lawsuit that Thomas-Rasset pilfered 1,700 songs. The RIAA eventually culled that number down to a representative sample of 24.
Talk about excessive. 24 songs, which you can get for $1 each at any online music store are suddenly worth $80,000 per piece. That suggests that every song was uploaded 80,000 times, 1.92 million times in total. If one assumes 5MB per mp3, that'd be more than 9TB to upload. Considering that many US ISP's cap users for reaching fractions of that, there's some serious doubt about how correct the numbers are. Especially since the RIAA had no way to determine the real upload stats; so they just came up with fabricated ones. Putting all that aside: the industry won't get a single dollar. Do they really think she could pay that much?