$222,000 Damages Award Nullified In P2P File-Sharing Case

The much-watched proceeding, testing the robustness of copyright in the digital age, has taken yet another twist. In Capital Records Inc. v. Thomas, a federal judge in Minnesota has nullified the jury's $222,000 judgment against a woman who "made available" downloads of copyrighted music in the share folder of her computer via the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing application Kazaa. The jury had found that the woman wilfully infringed 24 of the plaintiffs' sound recordings and awarded them $9,250 for each wilful infringement.

On his own motion, US District Court Judge Michael Davis ruled that he had made a manifest error of law in his instructions to the jury. He had told the jurors that "the act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners' exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown" (our