By: LINDSEY O’NEILL, ESQ. 

It’s official. Downloading music for free is illegal. At least, sometimes it’s illegal. A 12-person jury recently sided with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in deciding Jammie Thomas should be liable for copyright infringement. The jury ordered Thomas to pay the record companies $220,000 for sharing copyrighted music online.

The RIAA has been fighting a good fight since online music downloading became popular, but the legality of online music sharing hasn’t always been clear. In 1999 when Napster revolutionized the industry by making it easy for people to upload and download music on the internet, most people had barely even heard of downloading music online let alone understood the legality of it. It was easy, it was free, and it was popular. People started doing it. While the RIAA immediately claimed it was illegal, they went after Napster as the wrongdoer. To make matters worse, the RIAA lost its first lawsuit against Napster. This only furthered the confusion in the average consumer’s mind about the legality of online music sharing. Downloading music on the internet for free just exploded. It was easy, it was free, and it was everywhere. The legal issues were debated as well as the philosophical issues. This was one of those classic situations of law and society trying to catch up with technology.

Since they were losing on the legal side, the music industry launched a major campaign to educate people that free music downloads were illegal. The industry also got on the bandwagon and “legal” music downloading sites like iTunes were developed. Within months of iTunes launch in April 2003, iTunes had sold millions of songs on the internet. “Legal” music downloading had finally “arrived.” On parallel tracks, the music industry changed its legal strategy and started suing the music fans themselves for illegally sharing copyrighted music online.

Fast-forward to 2007 and Jammie Thomas is found liable for having shared music online. Even if the RIAA should have won, is it right for Jammie Thomas to have to pay $220,000 for sharing 25 songs back in February of 2005? What were most of us doing back then? Do you know anyone who was using free file sharing sites like Kazaa and Limewire? Sure, people had been shifting over to paid downloads with sites like iTunes. But, the peer-to-peer music sharing had already had several years lead time. People were familiar with it and they liked it. Moreover, during the years the file-sharing model had been supported by growing forces such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. The debate about whether music sharing was illegal had grown into whether it should be illegal, and whether there were other technological alternatives available. Jammie Thomas was just the only person willing to stand up for it.

Nevertheless, the RIAA won the battle. There is now legal precedent that a consumer can be held liable for sharing copyrighted music online. The key to the music industry’s success, however, was not the legal issue in my mind. The real reason they won is because they responded to the demand for downloading music online. The majority of people wanted the ease of downloading music online and the ability to select only certain songs more than just simply wanting to get free music. Once the music industry gave the public this solution, they could more easily win the argument in the court of public opinion that free online music sharing was illegal. That gave them a jury pool that they didn’t have previously.

To find more information about copyright law or intellectual property law, feel free to visit LawInfo’s Legal Resource center at: http://www.lawinfo.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/Client.consumer.

Keywords associated with this article: copyright, copyright law, intellectual property attorneys.