The defendant, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, was found liable to the plaintiff record company for making 24 songs available to the public for free on the Kazaa file sharing service and ordered to pay $220,000.
The labels' complaint alleged that Thomas infringed copyright on February 21, 2005, downloading and distributing songs by such bands as Aerosmith, Green Day, and Guns N' Roses.
[11] On October 4, 2007, after 5 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict finding her liable for willful infringement, and awarded statutory damages in the amount of $9,250 for each of the 24 songs for a total of $222,000.
The judge in Thomas' trial then, sua sponte (of his own accord), issued an order indicating a possible "manifest error of law" in connection with his "making available" jury instruction, on the ground that it may have contravened binding 8th Circuit precedent, and on the ground that a case upon which the RIAA and the Court had relied had been vacated by the Court which had issued it, without Judge Davis's knowledge.
[12] Subsequently, the Court vacated the judgment, on the ground that "making available" could not be equated with "distribution" under "settled case law".
[13] The retrial which ensued found Thomas-Rasset liable for willful copyright infringement, and awarded plaintiffs damages of $1.92 million.
During oral arguments, the parties disagreed on whether Thomas-Rasset received notice of investigation, and whether she got the hard drive replaced to destroy evidence or because it was damaged in an unrelated incident.
[17] At one point, the plaintiffs drew a rebuke from the court for presenting new evidence of questionable relevance; it was partially stricken from the record.
[19] 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,[17] including many of the songs at issue, which she only ever ripped into WMA format, not MP3 as found in the shared folder.
[18] Closing arguments focused on the fact that none of the evidence pointed to Thomas-Rasset personally, but only to the IP address assigned to her Internet account.
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.
[27] On June 18, the court appointed a special master to facilitate negotiations due to the parties' failure to reach a settlement.
[36] 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.
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.
"[38] 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.