Thursday's $1.92 million file-sharing verdict against a Minnesota mother of four could provide copyright reform advocates with a powerful human symbol of the draconian penalties written into the nearly-35 year old Copyright Act. Then again, maybe not.

A Minnesota federal jury stung Jammie Thomas-Rasset with the enormous fine after concluding she infringed copyrights on 24 music tracks by sharing them on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. It was the defendant's second trial: The first ended in a $222,000 verdict for the same songs, but was nullified after the judge presiding over the case said he provided faulty jury instructions that favored the recording industry.

But the retrial only put the defiant Thomas-Rasset deeper in debt than before, and sparked a popular backlash on blogs and Twitter. Now would-be copyright reformers are hoping to turn the stratospheric judgment into a rallying cry for action in Washington. "The verdict will give ammunition to lawyers, academics and judges who want to impose a constitutional limit on statutory damages," says Ben Sheffner, a copyright attorney who writes the Copyrights & Campaigns blog.

There's no doubt that a multi-million dollar judgment over $24 worth of music provides the clearest example yet of the abuses made possible by the 1976 Copyright Act, which Congress modified in 1999, at the behest of Hollywood and the recording industry, to carry a maximum penalty for a single infringement of up to $150,000. That statutory penalty was intended to bankrupt large-scale commercial pirating operations, like organized DVD and CD bootleggers; not to put individuals like Thomas-Rasset in debt for the rest of their lives.

The verdict comes against a backdrop of rising opposition to such outrageous fines, from the judge presiding over the Thomas-Rasset case to the blogosphere and legal scholars. In a file-sharing case pending in Massachusetts, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is arguing that the maximum $150,000 fine per infringement is unconstitutionally excessive in violation of due process and the prohibition on cruel-and-unusual punishment. The Obama administration weighed in on that case to support such huge damages, taking the same position as the Bush administration.

And legal scholars at the University of California at Berkeley are proposing a rewrite of the Copyright Act. In a forthcoming research paper, fellow Tara Wheatland and Berkeley scholar, Pamela Samuelson, argue that juries and judges need more congressional guidance when it comes to their deliberations on damages.

"We know of no other area of law in which judges and juries are given such open-ended discretion to award up to $150,000 in damages without any burden of proof on plaintiff to prove the fact or extent of the harms they suffered," the duo write in Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform.

In an e-mail interview, Wheatland said that the award in the Thomas-Rasset case was "wildly disproportionate to the amount of actual damages conceivably inflicted by her conduct, and is far more than would be necessary to deter her and others like her from engaging in peer-to-peer file sharing."

Even the judge who presided over Thomas-Rasset's trials, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, wrote last year that the original penalty was too high.

Now lawyers for the woman – if they don't broker a settlement with the Recording Industry Association of America – are likely to go before Davis to attack the award. If they take Berkman's approach, they have a big hurdle: The U.S. Supreme Court once rejected a cruel-and-unusual challenge to a 50-year prison term received by a California man caught shoplifting golf clubs.

Copyright expert Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a recent blog post that under a Supreme Court precedent, the justices have concluded that punitive damages, generally, should be no higher than nine times the actual damages. The case is not squarely on-point with Thomas-Rasset's, where the award was based on the statute, and not an arbitrary number intended purely to punish a defendant. But assuming each download in the Thomas-Rasset case is valued at $1, her judgment is at a ratio of a stunning 800,000-to-1.

It's easy to see a congressman or congresswoman – from a state other than California – grilling a recording industry executive on CSPAN about the fundamental unfairness of the Thomas-Rasset award. But the image begins to fade when one considers the full facts of the case. She's not quite the poster child for change.

Confronted with powerful evidence of infringement, Thomas-Rasset concocted two ludicrous defenses for both trials. At the first, she said a hacker must have hijacked her home wireless connection, even though she didn't own a wireless router. At the second trial last week, she testified that her children may have been the culprits.

And in the discovery phase of the proceedings, she was caught turning over a different hard drive than the one used at the time of the infringements.

And both trials occurred only after she rejected settlement offers twice, one as low as $5,000.

A key element of the Free Jammie meme – that she was only caught sharing 24 songs – is misleading. That's all the RIAA sued her for, but the industry's investigators picked those 24 songs from her Kazaa library of 1,700 tracks.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the case, has said it is winding down its 5-year-old litigation campaign, which has snagged some 30,000 defendants. Most all have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. So far, Thomas-Rasset was the only one to go to trial.

Ronald Rosen, the author of Music and Copyright, a treatise on copyright law published last year, suggested the verdict in the Thomas-Rasset case was, indeed, too high. But in the end, he claims, it was generally consistent with Congress' intent in passing and fortifying the Copyright Act.

"It was really to stop people from infringing," Rosen says. "There's always been good lobbying on behalf of Hollywood and the record industry and so forth. Congress just felt people should be discouraged from copying, and the creators shouldn't suffer."

Even at $80,000-a-song, Jammie Thomas-Rasset's verdict may not be enough to change lawmakers' minds.

Image: A downcast Jammie Thomas, right, leaves the federal courthouse with her attorney after losing her first civil trial in 2007. (AP Photo/Julia Cheng)

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