Jammie Thomas is heading back to court. Thomas, who was the first file-sharing defendant to proceed all the way through a jury trial, was unable to settle her case with the music industry during negotiations yesterday. After two hours in a courtroom, Judge Raymond Erickson ended the hearing, clearing the way for a Thomas retrial this summer.

Thomas lost her first trial and found herself on the hook for more than $200,000 in damages. But the judge overseeing the case later decided that he had been wrong about one of his instructions to the jury, saying that just making a file available for download over the Internet wasn't enough to prove that actual copyright infringement had taken place.

Now, with the failure of the settlement conference, the entire case is set to be litigated again in June. Given that the RIAA says its investigators actually downloaded several files from Thomas' computer, and that jurors the first time around perceived Thomas to be lying, this is certainly a risky gambit.

Between the Thomas case and the Joel Tenenbaum case, also due to be litigated this summer, 2009 could be a pivotal year for this sort of lawsuit, even though the RIAA says it has abandoned the mass litigation strategy that started these cases in the first place.