RIAA Piracy Trial Set to Begin Tuesday

The first piracy suit from RIAA to make it to trial starts Tuesday, with Jammie Thomas fighting accusations of sharing some 1,702 songs through the Kazaa network.

Thomas is the first of 26,000 sued by the organization to fight the charges. A large majority of those have already settled out of court by paying a few thousand dollars. However, the Minnesota mother says she has done nothing wrong.

Lawyers for the woman say the record industry still has not solidly proven she shared the songs. RIAA begs to differ: in February 2005, contractor SafeNet says it found her sharing songs under her account, and was able to download 26 pirated MP3s.

Named in the suit against her are Virgin Records America, Capitol, and Warner Music Group, among others.

Fighting the record industry in court is a risky proposition. If she loses the case, she will not only be responsible for the tens of thousands of dollars in court and lawyer fees, but penalties of anywhere from $19,500 to $3.9 million.

But Thomas's lawyers are pressing forward. They have already successfully had 784 pages of documents of proof of ownership of the songs thrown out because they were produced too late.

They also plan to argue that the labels really do not own the songs at all, which is somewhat true: usually the rights to music are owned by publishers and distributors.

RIAA began targeting individual downloaders in September 2003 under the belief that putting individuals at risk of legal action may stem the tide of illegal downloading. While the industry says it has helped, the number of Internet users with file sharing programs has continued to increase.

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