Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
The music industry, locked in a legal and ethical tussle over the rights of consumers to download songs over the Internet, last week scored a key victory in a civil trial.

The Agence France-Presse reports tha the first major U.S. trial to challenge the illegal downloading of music on the Internet concluded with a surprisingly harsh verdict: Jammie Thomas, a Native American single mother from Minnesota who works as a clerk in her tribal office, was ordered to pay more than $220,000 for sharing 24 songs online.

Thomas is one of thousands who were ued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and major music labels for downloading and sharing music. She was among the first to refuse to settle with the RIAA and take her case to trial.

According to a report from the technology news agency CNET, the case, which is expected to be the tee shot for many similar suits, involved tracing the woman’s Internet address after she had downloaded the songs and made them available on what is known as a “peer-to-peer” network, where downloaders can share music.

An important precedent was set in the case when the judge ruled that in order to prove damage from copyright infringement, the plaintiff must prove only that the downloader left the songs in a publicly available directory from which they could be shared, reported technology news service ZDNet.

The verdict immediately focused attention on the ethical implications of the music industry using a middle-class single mother with two children as test case in its fight against music piracy.

In an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times last Thursday, staff writer Ann Powers contended that the choice of songs, an eclectic collection spanning four decades and resembling a “playlist for a family party,” seems more like a harmless personal compilation than something that would endanger sales and royalties.

“True,” Powers writes, “Thomas could have burned a CD of these tracks from the vast record collection she claims to own. She could have purchased the songs again from iTunes. But what she probably really wanted to do was just hear them occasionally, the way you hear songs on the radio. She wanted a wide array of music, easily available. Radio, split into niche markets and limited by tiny, repetitive playlists, wasn’t giving her that.”

The music industry has argued that the ease with which digitally encoded songs can be copied and shared will cripple legitimate commerce in music if piracy is left unchecked.