No harm, no foul? P2P user says $1.5M award should be zeroed out

By Nate Anderson

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first US citizen to take her file-sharing lawsuit all the way to a verdict, has been hit with three separate damage awards: $222,000, $1.92 million, and recently $1.5 million. The judge has made clear that these figures are absurd; after the second trial, he declared $54,000 the most that he could possibly allow.
But what does Thomas-Rasset think she owes? Nothing.
In a filing this week, her lawyers asked the judge to reduce the damage award to zero:

This award violates the Due Process Clause because it bears no reasonable relationship to the actual damages that the defendant caused. While the plaintiffs offered evidence of the harm caused by file sharing in general, they were unable to present evidence of any harm caused by this defendant in particular...
The statutory damages assessed in this case bear no relation to the actual injury that this defendant caused. The plaintiffs complain that this is because the injury they suffered due to distribution of free music on KaZaA cannot be traced to any particular defendant. That may be true, but it does not follow that one defendant can be punished for the harm that KaZaA itself—that file-sharing technology itself—caused. The testimony was clear that the plaintiffs cannot trace and, indeed, made no attempt to trace, the particular injury that this defendant caused. If this Court agrees that the Constitution requires some proportionality between actual damages and statutory damages imposed to punish and deter, then the complete dearth of evidence of actual damages that the plaintiffs presented in this case requires a take-nothing verdict.

As for the RIAA, they want the verdict to stand, but most of their motion this week was about the crucial importance of issuing a permanent injunction against Thomas-Rasset so that she never violates their copyrights again.
Reply motions are due early next year, and it could take a couple months more for the judge to issue a final ruling.