• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 5, 2007

In a closely watched trial, the music industry has scored its first courtroom victory against a consumer accused of infringing copyright by uploading music.

A federal jury in Duluth, Minn. yesterday afternoon ordered 30-year-old single mother Jammie Thomas to pay $222,000 to the Recording Industry Association of America, $9,250 for each of 24 tracks the jury found she uploaded to peer-to-peer service Kazaa.

The case was the first of its kind to go to a jury trial, but probably won't be the last. If anything, file-sharing is even more common now, as broadband penetration has grown and some people have come to expect free music online.

The record industry has so far brought cases against around 30,000 people, though it has settled or else withdrawn the case against the vast majority of them. But some lawyers say the recent victory could encourage more aggressive enforcement actions.

At the same time, there are significant legal issues yet to be determined, including whether uploading a track constitutes sharing it, or whether the record labels must additionally show that someone subsequently downloaded that same track. The judge in this case, Michael J. Davis, decided that uploading alone sufficed, but that holding doesn't set a precedent because it wasn't made by an appellate court.

And it looks like even the judge wasn't entirely convinced on that point. Before settling on a final jury instruction stating that uploading files alone could constitute a copyright infringement, he proposed telling the jurors that an actual transfer to a third person must take place before they could find infringement had occurred.