US woman to pay 1.92 mln dlrs in music piracy case

0 Comments | AFP, June, 2009

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AFP) — A US jury has ordered a 32-year-old woman to pay nearly two million dollars in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs over the Internet in a high-profile digital piracy case.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from the Minnesota town of Brainerd, was found liable of violating music copyrights for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network to download the songs.

The jury took just under five hours on Thursday to reach its verdict.

It ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay 1.92 million dollars -- or 80,000 dollars per song -- to six record companies: Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music, Arista Records, Interscope Records, Warner Bros. Records and UMG Recordings.

In his closing arguments on Thursday, attorney Timothy...