The court awarded the companies $22,500 in statutory damages (representing the statutory minimum of $750 per song multiplied by the defendant's 30 infringing downloads), and issued a permanent injunction forbidding Gonzalez from downloading copyrighted recordings owned by the plaintiffs in the future.

The circuit court first reasoned that the songs that Gonzalez had downloaded were infringing copies of the copyrighted originals, rejecting her analogy to the time shifting doctrine handed down in the Supreme Court's landmark Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.

[3] In its analysis of the fair use argument, the circuit court considered the four factors of that defense that may or may not have worked in Gonzalez's favor.

The circuit court declared that this argument was both factually unsupported and inconsistent with the Supreme Court's then-recent decision about file sharing in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.[4] and related cases on modern Internet-enabled copyright infringement: As she tells the tale, downloading on a try-before-you-buy basis is good advertising for copyright proprietors, expanding the value of their inventory.

[5] The circuit court's ruling in BMG Music v. Gonzalez was praised in some quarters for clarifying the ability of copyright holders to initiate suits against people who engaged in unauthorized file sharing on the Internet,[6] and for influencing the development of paid music services like iTunes as a solution to unauthorized copying.

[7] Conversely, some scholars described the ruling as enabling the persecution of individuals like Gonzalez by record companies to make a point about widespread file sharing, most of which remained uncontrolled and unprosecuted,[8][9] thus leaving unsettled questions about the appropriate legal responses to new consumer behaviors.