RIAA was awarded statutory damages of $1.92 M for infringement of 24
MP3s in Capitol Records v Thomas-Rasset. This
amounts to $80,000 per song file. The defendent
never called her technical expert to testify and her attorneys never challenged the evidence offered by the RIAA's MediaSentry and Doug Jacobson. Slashdot.org reports:
Also, neither the special verdict form nor the jury instructions spelled out what the elements of a 'distribution' are, or what needed to be established by the plaintiffs in order to recover statutory — as opposed to actual — damages.
