First trial The first trial against Thomas was held in
Duluth, Minnesota and was presided over by U.S. District Court Judge
Michael J. Davis. Thomas was represented by
Minneapolis attorney Brian Toder. The plaintiffs alleged that on February 21, 2005, Jammie Thomas shared a total of 1,702 tracks online; however, plaintiffs sought relief for only 24 of these. Thomas contended that she was not the person behind the "tereastarr" account and denied having downloaded any files. During the trial, her lawyer suggested her computer could have been under the control of people elsewhere by means of "a spoof, a zombie or some other type of hack". Juror Michael Hegg later commented, "She's a liar." A
hard drive containing the copyrighted songs was never presented at the trial, though Thomas did turn over a hard drive that referenced neither Kazaa nor the infringing files to the plaintiffs' attorneys. The issue of whether copyright infringement required actual distribution was raised by the defense during examination of
Sony BMG's head of litigation on the first day of trial, but the court sustained the plaintiffs' objection and did not permit the topic to be revisited until jury instructions were prepared just before the trial's conclusion. Subsequently, the Court vacated the judgment, on the ground that "making available" could not be equated with "distribution" under "settled case law". The retrial which ensued found Thomas-Rasset liable for willful copyright infringement, and awarded plaintiffs damages of $1.92 million.
Highlights In May 2009, during preparation for the retrial, Brian Toder stepped down as Thomas-Rasset's lawyer. Thomas-Rasset then accepted Joe Sibley and
Kiwi Camara's offer to defend her
pro bono. Before the trial, Camara unsuccessfully tried to persuade the court to bar evidence collected by
MediaSentry, arguing that the company was not a licensed private investigator under the Minnesota Private Detectives Act (MPDA) and that it violated federal
pen register and
wiretapping laws. In rejecting these arguments, the court said that the MPDA did not apply to an out-of-state entity like MediaSentry, and that "There is no expectation of solitude or seclusion when a person activates a file sharing program and sends a file to the requesting computer. By participating in Kazaa, a user expects millions of other users to view and copy her files, each time receiving the very information that Thomas-Rasset sent to MediaSentry and MediaSentry recorded." Camara also tried to raise a
fair use defense at the last minute, but it was disallowed on procedural grounds. Fair use is an
affirmative defense which would have to have been raised prior to the first trial, or at least reasonably early enough to allow for
discovery in the retrial, whereas the retrial date was only days away. The arguments presented by the plaintiffs included technical details tying the shared folder on Kazaa to her IP address, the user name in the shared folder matching the user name on many of the defendant's online accounts, and the fact that numerous files in the shared folder contained
tags giving credit to uploaders and
ripping groups—indicating they were likely downloaded, not ripped from her own CDs. The defense argued that Thomas-Rasset had no reason to download music, as she was one of the plaintiffs' best customers, having legally purchased over 200 CDs, After 5 hours of deliberation on June 18, the jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for willful copyright infringement of all the songs in question, and awarded the plaintiffs statutory damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per song, within the allowed range of $750 to $150,000).
Motion for injunction On July 6, 2009, the plaintiffs filed a motion asking for an injunction against Thomas-Rasset that would require her to destroy all infringing sound recordings on her computer and desist from any further infringement of their copyrights. Their motion claims trial evidence established that Thomas-Rasset "was distributing 1,702 sound recordings ... to millions of other users," and that the plaintiffs would face "great and irreparable harm" were she to continue to infringe upon their copyrights.
Reduction of damages and settlement offer Also on July 6, 2009, Thomas-Rasset filed a motion asserting the statutory damage award was so disproportionate to actual damages as to be unconstitutional, and announcing her intention to appeal two prior court orders permitting the plaintiffs to present certain evidence at trial. The evidence in question included allegedly incomplete and therefore inadmissible copyright registrations, and Thomas-Rasset claimed that evidence collected by
MediaSentry should have been inadmissible because it was collected in violation of state private investigator and wiretap statutes. The motion called for either a retrial with that evidence suppressed, a reduction of damages to the statutory minimum ($750 per song; $18,000 total), or a removal of statutory damages altogether. The following January, Judge Davis reduced the amount of the damages to $54,000 under the
common law doctrine of
remittitur, characterizing the original damages as "monstrous and shocking." A few days later, the plaintiffs proposed a $25,000 settlement to Thomas-Rasset. She declined. The plaintiffs then rejected the damage reduction ordered by the judge. On June 18, the court appointed a
special master to facilitate negotiations due to the parties' failure to reach a settlement.
Third trial After unsuccessful negotiations, a third trial to re-determine the amount of damages was set for October 4, 2010, later rescheduled to November 1, 2010. For this trial, the jury was instructed that the issues of the defendant's liability and willfulness had been determined by a previous jury, and in determining the damage amounts, it "may consider the willfulness of the defendant's conduct, the defendant's innocence, the defendant's continuation of infringement after notice or knowledge of the copyright or in reckless disregard of the copyright, the effect of the defendant's prior or concurrent copyright infringement activity, whether profit or gain was established, the value of the copyright, the need to deter this defendant and other potential infringers, and any mitigating circumstances." The amounts were to be assessed within the statutory range of $750 to $150,000 per song. A month later, Thomas-Rasset's attorneys requested that the court reduce the award to either zero or an amount the court believes is
constitutional, arguing that the
Due Process Clause had been violated because the plaintiffs hadn't proven that the defendant, specifically, had caused them any actual harm, only that file sharing, in general, had. In July 2011, the court ruled that the $1.5 million award was "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable." The court again reduced the jury award to $54,000, or $2,250 per song. The record labels filed for appeal in the
Eighth Circuit on August 22.
Appellate proceedings In December 2011, in its opening brief for the appeal, the plaintiffs asked the court to hear oral arguments pertaining to the exclusivity of the distribution right and the constitutionality of statutory damages which bear no relation to actual damages. The
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), concerned about the ramifications of the case for its industry, filed an
amicus curiae brief providing further arguments in favor of the plaintiffs' point of view. Both briefs contend that making-available is a form of distribution, and that actual damages are irrelevant to statutory damages. In March 2012, the plaintiffs, citing the
St. Louis, I. M. & S. Railway Co. v. Williams case as precedent, argued that due process was satisfied by a jury's statutory damage award, regardless of whether it bears "a reasonable relation to the plaintiff's actual injury...regardless of whether actual damages can be proven, regardless of whether the defendant's infringement was willful, and regardless of Congress's interest in deterring conduct deemed to be contrary to the public interest." In an effort to simplify the case to deal only with the constitutionality of a very large statutory damage award against a noncommercial file-sharer, Thomas-Rasset agreed to drop the making-available issue and accept an injunction against further making-available of copyrighted works to the public, but asked the court to explicitly state that no decision had been reached on the issue and that it was merely being set aside. Oral arguments were presented June 12, 2012, before judges
Murphy,
Melloy, and
Colloton. On September 11, 2012, the court concluded the District Court made two errors: • The original damage award of $222,000 was constitutional, subject to the
Williams standard, and should not have been reduced on due process grounds; and • The District Court's injunction against Thomas-Rasset should have included a prohibition on making available sound recordings for distribution. The court declined to rule on whether making-available infringes the distribution right, as it was not an issue decided by the lower court. The RIAA, reaffirming prior arguments and pointing out that there is no disagreement among the lower courts, urged that the petition be rejected. The court denied certiorari on March 18, 2013.
Aftermath In March 2013, Thomas-Rasset announced she would declare
bankruptcy to avoid paying the RIAA the $222,000. The RIAA suggested that it would accept a lower payment if Thomas-Rasset would make a video about copyright infringement, which she refused. As of April 2016, the RIAA had not announced receipt of any payments from Thomas-Rasset. ==See also==