Jury Finds Minnesota Woman Guilty of Using P2P Program, Must Pay Richard Marx $9,250

RIAA 1, Kazaa Users 0. In the first trial involving the record-industry union versus an illegal downloader, a jury found Minnesota single mother Jammie Thomas guilty of infringing on music rights. While Thomas was illegally sharing 1,702 songs in her folder, she was only sued for twenty-four recordings. The price she'll have to pay: $222,000, or $9,250 per song, or 9,250 songs bought legally on iTunes. Some of the artists that Thomas was illegally harboring included Janet Jackson, Sarah McLachlan, Godsmack, Richard Marx and many other artists not worth $9,250 a song (honestly, who is? -- but to be fair, those acts were pretty hot in the Nineties).

So what's to be learned from this trial? First, thanks to the win, the RIAA will start gunning for even more P2P users, and two, the record industry thinks ripping tracks from a CD to your computer is theft. "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song," testified Jennifer Pariser, an exec at Sony BMG. As usual, it sounds like the ailing record industry really has its finger on the pulse of America.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter