Credit: U.S. Embassy, Jakarta 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. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Obama administration defends $222,000 file-sharing verdict
