A Brainerd mother of four found responsible last month for $1.5 million in damages to the Recording Industry Association of America has filed a motion to remove any award of damages, or at least reduce them.
In two earlier trials, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found liable for distributing 24 songs on the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network. A federal jury in Minneapolis was charged with determining how much money she owed the record companies. After hearing two days of testimony, jurors decided Thomas-Rasset should pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs she illegally distributed.
In her motion filed this week, Thomas-Rasset argues that the recording industry was unable to present evidence of any harm she personally caused the plaintiffs and that any damages permitted under the Copyright Act would be unconstitutional.
The recording industry also filed a motion this week seeking that the court amend the judgment to include an injunction prohibiting Thomas-Rasset from further infringing the plaintiffs' copyrights and ordering her to destroy all copies of sound recordings made in violation of the recording industry's exclusive rights.
Damages in this case have been reduced before.
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In a June 2009 trial in Minneapolis, a jury found that Thomas-Rasset was liable for $1.92 million in damages, but U.S. District Judge Michael Davis reduced that award to $54,000. The court gave the recording industry the option of accepting the reduced damages or scheduling a separate trial on the issue of damages. That trial was held in November.
In the first trial against Thomas-Rasset -- the nation's first music downloading case to go to trial -- jurors in Duluth in 2007 found Thomas-Rasset liable for $222,000 in damages. But Davis ruled that he had given jurors an erroneous instruction of law and granted a new trial.
Testimony at the trials indicated that more than 1,700 songs were found on Thomas-Rasset's shared folder, which she was actively distributing to more than 2 million people on the peer-to-peer network KaZaA, but the music companies chose to sue on only 24 of those songs.
