Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America won a jaw-dropping legal victory when a federal jury ruled against plaintiff Jammie Thomas and awarded the RIAA $220,000 for making 24 songs (and, allegedly, thousands of others) available via the file-sharing service Kazaa. Now, the RIAA might be singing a different song: U.S. District Judge Michael Davis has declared a mistrial in the case, saying he committed a "manifest error of law" by instructing the jury that Thomas could be found guilty without any proof of actual distribution of copyrighted material.
The mistrial ruling grants Thomas a new trail and voids the $220,000 penalty levied against her. In the even the RIAA decides to bring the case to court a second time, it will now likely have to prove actual distribution of each song for which it is seeking copyright infringement damages. To date, the RIAA has been basing its claims of copyright infringement on allegations that alleged file sharers have simply made the content available for distribution; now, they may have to clear a higher hurdle and prove that the material actually was distributed in violation of copyright.
To date, Jammie Thomas’s case is the only RIAA file sharing lawsuit that’s actually gone to trial. However, the RIAA has been aggressive with its legal action, with most estimates having the organization filing almost 30,000 lawsuits against individual file sharers. Most have been settled out of court.
The RIAA has previously argued to Judge Davis that requiring proof of actual distribution of copyrighted material via file sharing networks would make copyright enforcement nearly impossible, since the actual file transfers effectively take place as a private conversation between a distributor’s computer and a recipient.
