It was only a matter of time: Jammie Thomas-Rasset has asked the federal judge overseeing her file-sharing lawsuit to toss the $1.92 million damage award, reduce it to the statutory minimum of $18,000, or grant her a new trial.

The motion, filed today in Minnesota federal court, is blunt. "The verdict in this case was shocking," it begins. "For 24 songs, available for $1.29 on iTunes, the jury assessed statutory damages of $80,000 per song—a ratio of 1:62,015. For 24 albums, available for no more than $15 at the store, the jury assessed statutory damages of $80,000 per album—a ratio of 1:5,333. For a single mother's noncommercial use of KaZaA, and upon neither finding nor evidence of actual injury to the plaintiffs, the judgment fines Jammie Thomas $1.92 million. Such a judgment is grossly excessive and, therefore, subject to remittitur as a matter of federal common law."

These shocking ratios—1:62,015 and 1:5,333—appear throughout the filing, though they're largely irrelevant. Thomas-Rasset wasn't sued simply for violating the "reproduction right" found in the Copyright Act; she was also accused of violating the "distribution right" by putting the songs up on KaZaA for millions of others to download. How many people did so? No one knows—which is one sort of situation that statutory damages were created to address. The real ratios can never be known.

That doesn't change the fact that the jury's verdict was nuts—or, in the words of the filing, "excessive, shocking, and monstrous." (Richard Marx, who wrote and performed one of the 24 songs at issue in the case, agreed.) Thomas-Rasset's lawyers argue that the $1.92 million damage award is, on its face, an unconstitutional breach of the Due Process clause and should be thrown out or reduced to the $750 per song minimum.

In their view, the award was quite obviously punitive in nature, and that's a problem. "The targets of her conduct are the largest recording companies in the United States and are hardly financially vulnerable relative to those plaintiffs—maimed children, for examples—who we think of as most deserving of punitive damages," says the filing.

Calling the statutory damages "punitive" allows Thomas-Rasset's lawyers to link her case to BMW v. Gore, a 1996 case that said massive punitive awards beyond a certain ratio were unconstitutional (anything over 1:10 is generally suspect).

It's hard to imagine Judge Michael Davis wanting to enter the bigtop for this circus a third time, though Thomas-Rasset's lawyers do suggest a new trial as a possibility. But Davis did author an extraordinary opinion after the first trial, one in which he implored Congress to change the law and expressed clear dissatisfaction with the $222,000 award. With the award in the second trial nearly 10 times greater than that in the first, Davis might well be looking for some reason to cut the amount down to size—though we'd be shocked if he altered the award to a "take-nothing judgment," as Thomas-Rasset suggests.

The third option, reducing the award to the statutory minimum of $18,000 ($750 x 24 songs), wouldn't seem to help Thomas-Rasset much; the labels have made clear they remain willing to settle, and past settlements (even of cases that have gone to trial) are generally much lower than this amount.

Finally, the lawyers make clear that Thomas-Rasset will move to exclude RIAA investigator MediaSentry's evidence on appeal. While Judge Davis allowed the evidence, pointing out that the company could hardly violate Minnesota's private detective rules when it had never operated in the state, Thomas-Rasset's team argues that MediaSentry broke private investigator rules in the states where it did operate (New Jersey and Maryland), and all of its evidence should be thrown out.

For their part, the record labels also filed a motion today, asking the judge to alter the judgment against Thomas-Rasset to include a permanent injunction against future copyright infringement. One suspects, however, that if a $1.92 million award isn't enough to make Thomas-Rasset stop sharing files, a permanent injunction won't be any more effective.