A week after signaling her intention to appeal the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict handed down by a federal jury, Jammie Thomas has filed her notice of appeal with the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas is citing the amount of the award as her grounds for the appeal, rather than the jury instructions.

According to a copy of Thomas' motion seen by Ars, Thomas wants a retrial on the actual damages allegedly suffered by the record labels as the result of the sharing of the 24 recordings she was found to have distributed via KaZaA. Her argument is that the award handed down by the jury is unconstitutionally excessive.

When Zachary McCune, a student at Brown, received an e-mail message from the university telling him he might have broken the law by downloading copyrighted songs, his eyes glazed over the warning and he quickly forgot about it. “I already knew what they’d say about file-sharing,” he said. “It’s become a campus cliché.”

But the next day, he realized the message had an attachment from the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that is coordinating legal efforts by record companies to crack down on Internet piracy. The attachment told Mr. McCune he faced a lawsuit with potential fines of $750 to $150,000 for every illegally downloaded song.

Like a snake eating its tail, the Mega Music Industry has launched its four-pronged strategy to destroy itself:

* destroy the goodwill of music fans by entrapping the children, the poor and the technically illiterate then suing them;
* continue to release music that no one would be caught dead sharing;
* turn their back on profitable, legal sales by backing out of deals with legal music sales entities, like Apple’s iTunes music store;
* finally, gut fair-use by pursuing those true thieves–their own customers–who burn mix CDs or rip their own music for their iPods.

A big hello to whole-life logging

The UK Identity & Passport Service (IPS) has staged an identity landgrab on birth, marriage and death records. From April 2008 the General Register Office, which is responsible for recording these matters and is currently a directorate of the Office of National Statistics, is to become part of IPS, meaning that IPS will be logging you from the moment you're born until the moment you die.

The logic of the move is chilling. The UK ID card scheme itself only requires registration for an ID card from age 16, while the passport part of the deal only, obviously, needs to have data on people who have passports. But... IPS has entirely and obviously unfeasible plans to make money by promoting itself to the status of the UK's de facto identity services broker, with passport validation and identity verification services being early manifestations of how it proposes to make money out of this. But if IPS is to be able to grow its offerings from simply checking if a passport is genuine into a general ID verification service, then it makes sense to have everybody in the database, whether they like it or not.

Months after a bill that could have required universities to police student downloaders was dropped on Capitol Hill, universities are already bracing for round two.

Last week, Rep. Ric Keller (R-Fla.) and Rep. Howard P. McKeon (R-Calif.) proposed the College Access and Opportunity Act, a measure that would require universities to monitor students’ online activity for illegal file-sharing.

The bill echoes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) proposal, which was withdrawn in July after vocal opposition from universities and across the country.

Wendy Seltzer ’96, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in an e-mail that such legislation could “limit academic freedom” because existing software cannot distinguish between legal and illegal downloading, and would place pressure on universities.

If I were a big-shot L.A. music mogul, Jammie Thomas would not be my ideal poster child as the face of illegal file sharing.

Thomas, you'll recall, was convicted last week in a Duluth, Minnesota, court for violating copyright law by making a couple of dozen songs available to the multitudes. For this she was ordered to pay the recording industry $222,000 in damages, and she could lose even more to court costs and appeals.

All because she was among the 26,000 people sued by those Brioni suits known collectively as the Recording Industry Association of America, and hers was the first case to actually reach trial. The RIAA, faced with plummeting CD sales and increasingly restive artists, wanted to "send a message" to all the lowlifes out there who download music for free and undercut their profit margins.

It took the jury in Capitol Records v. Thomas only five minutes to conclude 30-year-old Jammie Thomas infringed recording industry copyrights on 24 music tracks, according to the first juror to speak out on the verdict.

The remaining five hours of deliberation was spent debating the appropriate financial penalty, with jurors haggling for both higher and lower awards, before settling last week on the final $222,000 figure, according to juror Michael Hegg, in an exclusive interview with THREAT LEVEL Tuesday.

At least two jurors, one of them a funeral home owner, wanted to award the Recording Industry Association of America the maximum $150,000 for each of the 24 copyright violations, while one juror held out hours for the $750 minimum for each violation of the Copyright Act, he said.

In an appearance on CNN along with her attorney Brian Toder, Jammie Thomas announced her decision to appeal last week's $222,000 willful copyright infringement verdict. The basis of her appeal will be jury instruction no. 15, which told the jurors that they could find Thomas liable for copyright infringement if she made the recordings available over a file-sharing network, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

The "making available" argument is a contentious one. As we noted last night in "How the RIAA tasted victory," judges have gone both ways on this issue. The question of whether making a file available over a P2P network falls under the category of distribution as defined by the Copyright Act is by no means settled in the eyes of the law.

Well, they’ve done it

Four venal record companies, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), have bankrupted a single mother with two children in their lust for money.

In what has to be one of the most outrageous verdicts ever recorded in America, without a shred of hard evidence, judge Michael J. Davis virtually instructed the jury to find Jamie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement, saying she must pay close to a quarter of a million dollars.

In the process, he made a mockery of the principle of fair use and a fair trial.

To all intents and purposes, the Big 4, all members of an organised music cartel who’ve been found guilty of price-fixing and bribery, among other things, own the RIAA, short for Recording Industry Association of America, and scores of similar organisations around the world, for example the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association), and so on.

The Bush administration said on Friday that the recording industry's $222,000 courtroom victory shows that the legal system is working against peer-to-peer pirates.

"Cases such as this remind us strong enforcement is a significant part of the effort to eliminate piracy, and that we have an effective legal system in the U.S. that enables rights holders to protect their intellectual property," said Chris Israel, the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement, to CNET News.com.

President Bush named Israel, formerly a senior Commerce Department official, to the key copyright post in July 2005. He has an MBA from George Washington University and, before joining the Bush administration, worked for Time Warner's public policy arm.