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Legal Lessons Gleaned from Music Industry's High-Profile, File-Sharing Litigation

By Stan Soocher
June 29, 2009

When the cash-strapped recording industry announced at the end of 2008 that it would largely drop its aggressive litigation campaign against unauthorized file sharers, some observers saw this as a defeat for record labels. But numerous court rulings have been issued over the past few years that debate and/or establish legal guidelines that will be referenced in file-sharer cases that are either still in the pipeline or may later crop up. This article examines some of the most recent of these cases and decisions.

Thomas

File-sharing litigation made big headlines in June 2009 for the retrial of Jammie Thomas, the losing defendant in both the first file-sharing suit against an individual user to go to trial and the trial replay. Chief District Judge Michael J. Davis of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota had ordered the second trial on the ground that he had improperly instructed the first trial jury that Thomas could be liable by “making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network ' regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.”

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