The Obama Administration has stepped into a long-running file-sharing lawsuit in Minnesota, urging the United States Supreme Court not to get involved in a six-figure verdict against a young mother from Northern Minnesota. The feds don't buy the woman's argument that the massive size of the award makes it unconstitutional.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been fighting a recording industry lawsuit accusing her of sharing music using the now-defunct peer-to-peer network Kazaa for the better part of a decade. In 2007, a jury found Thomas-Rasset liable to the tune of $222,000 for sharing 24 songs. She appealed the verdict, resulting in two more trials that each produced even larger jury awards. These higher figures were thrown out by the courts, but last year, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the $222,000 award.

Thomas-Rasset is now seeking review by the Supreme Court. In a December brief, her lawyer drew an analogy to a line of Supreme Court decisions regarding excessive punitive damages. In those cases, juries had awarded punitive damages that were more than 100 times larger than the actual damages suffered by the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court held that such disproportionate punitive damages violate the due process clause of the Constitution.

Technically, the "statutory damages" Thomas-Rasset is facing are not classified as punitive damages. But her lawyer argues that the same logic ought to apply. The 24 songs at issue in the case can be downloaded from iTunes for $24, yet she is being ordered to pay almost 10,000 times as much for sharing them with others.

Thomas-Rasset's lawyer notes that Thomas-Rasset's trial judge "called for relief from Congress, and throughout his opinions called the statutory damages sought by the recording industry harsh and oppressive."

But in a brief filed Monday, the Obama administration rejected Thomas-Rasset's argument and urged the Supreme Court not to consider her appeal. It noted that lower courts agreed with the defense in principle that an award could be "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable." Indeed, the trial judge had rejected a $1.5 million jury award on just those grounds. But the lower courts had concluded that a $222,000 award for sharing 24 songs was not so disproportionate and unreasonable as to violate the Constitution. And in the government's view, the Supreme Court should let that judgement stand.

"The public interest cannot be realized if the inherent difficulty of proving actual damages leaves the copyright holder without an effective remedy for infringement," the government's brief argues. Large penalties may be needed to adequately deter infringement. And while the range of possible damages established by Congress—between $750 and $150,000 per infringed work—may seem excessive to some, "Congress’s judgment as to the appropriate amounts is entitled to deference."

Unsurprisingly, the recording industry also opposed Thomas-Rasset's petition for a Supreme Court review of her case. "Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s copyright infringement was willful in the extreme," says a Monday brief from several major labels. "Three separate juries have concluded that her blatant and unapologetic violation of Respondents’ rights warranted a substantial award under the Copyright Act’s statutory damages provision." The recording industry insists that the six-figure penalty is justified in light of Thomas-Rasset's "particularly blameworthy conduct."

Thomas-Rasset faces long odds. Before she can make her case on the merits, the court must agree to hear her appeal. The Supreme Court accepts only a fraction of the appeals submitted to it, and in May it declined to review the case of Joel Tenenbaum, who like Thomas-Rasset is still fighting the recording industry in court.