• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 4, 2010

File-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset's third trial ended this week and, unfortunately for her, it went just about as well as the previous two.

Yesterday evening, the jurors ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay $1.5 million for sharing 24 tracks on Kazaa. That's down slightly from the $1.92 million that a second jury ordered, but up from the $222,000 arrived at by the first jury. (Both of those verdicts were set aside for different reasons in this convoluted case.)

The only other defendant to take his case to trial, Joel Tenenbaum, was hit with a verdict for $675,000 for sharing 30 tracks.

With this week's ruling against Thomas-Rasset, four juries have now considered the liability of non-commercial users who allegedly shared music on peer-to-peer networks and in every case have come up with damage figures that seem incomprehensible to many observers -- including the presiding judges.

U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner, who conducted Tenenbaum's trial, slashed the award against him down to $67,500, or $2,250 for each of the 30 tracks he shared. She ruled that the jury's award was unconstitutionally excessive.

The Recording Industry Association of America is appealing that decision. In a brief filed last week, the RIAA says that Gertner's decision wasn't driven by constitutional concerns as much as her belief "that the actions of individual file-sharers like Tenenbaum are 'fairly low on the totem pole of reprehensible conduct.'"

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis ruled last year that the $1.92 million award against Thomas-Rasset was "monstrous and shocking" and slashed it to $54,000, but allowed the record labels to reject that figure and seek another trial. (The record industry offered Thomas-Rasset a chance to settle for $25,000 but she turned that down, following which they rejected the $54,000 verdict.)

Now that the jury has again come back with a verdict that Davis will likely find "monstrous and shocking," it's unclear whether he will follow Gertner's lead and rule the damage award unconstitutional. Either way, Thomas-Rasset and the RIAA are probably already mapping out their appellate briefs.