May 12th, 2009
Jammie Thomas case heads for retrial
Jammie Thomas and the recording industry have failed to come to a settlement in the now-infamous case of Capitol Records v. Thomas, Wired reports.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise since Thomas has said she would never settle. Her lawyer, Brian Toder, merely said:
What they wanted to do, my client did not want to do.
Thomas clearly wants to force the RIAA back to trial, where they may be hard-pressed to prove diddly, since they have deprived of their “making available” theory of copyright infringement.
Judge Michael Davis said he made a “manifest error of law” (how often does that happen?) when he instructed jurors that they should find Thomas violated copyright merely because music files were made available to the Internet via her computer. It was unclear whether the instruction was important in the jury’s $220,000 verdict.
With settlement off the table, the case moves for retrial starting June 15.
