Jammie Thomas hits filesharing headlines again

Jammie Thomas, the world’s most famous filesharer, is in the news once again this week, but it’s not good news for the single mother who the RIAA successfully sued for $220,000 in damages.

The US Department of Justice has sided with the RIAA in the constitutionality of the case. Jammie Thomas was stung for sharing 24 songs using P2P filesharing software – that’s $9,250 per song.

Jammie Thomas had appealed the ruling on the grounds that $220,000 was constitutionally excessive. The US Department of Justice, however, doesn’t see it that way. In a brief about the case, the department stated:

Statutory damages compensate those wronged in areas in which actual damages are hard to quantify in addition to providing deterrence to those inclined to commit a public wrong.

Even though each track is worth only about 70 cents a piece, the idea here is that the damage of sharing a song could be significantly higher – about 10,000 times higher in this case.

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