Judge Michael Davis recently reduced Thomas’ damages from $1.9 million dollars (decided June 09) to $54,000. I still think this is steep for 24 songs, some of which I would gladly pay you to play never again. If only I could get them out of my head.

I think somebody should take the songs downloaded and do one of those FBI profiles. Maybe they have the wrong person after all. Look at the list of the music she downloaded. The music’s all over the place. After all, how could the same person be into Journey, Gloria Estefan, and Guns ‘n Roses? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Even if I were truly innocent, after seeing what a trial of your peers came up with, I might be tempted to take the deal, too. Never mind, protesting innocence. How is a natural resources coordinator going to come up with that kind of money? If anything, she’ll probably declare bankruptcy and walk away from the whole thing.

Scary is the way the jurors used the law to brand Thomas as a distributor as opposed to her just making the music available. Maybe we need to update our digital copyright laws using drugs as a model. Somebody with a nickel bag isn’t going to do much distribution with said bag. While I wouldn’t call file sharing a victimless crime, where’s the profit in any of this? It’s not as if Thomas had a cottage industry going on where she was printing up copies of these songs and selling them at street festivals.

I’m not sure who scares me more, RIAA or Jammie Thomas. She just doesn’t quit. Alright, the thing I really don’t understand about this case is what is going on inside Jammie Thomas’ head? She’s had plenty of opportunities to get out of this whole mess. Once with a $5,000 deal and another time with a $25,000. Her deal is that she’s really innocent and somebody else came by and used her computer. She does have four sons.

Maybe the problem is that the technology makes everything so easy. A click here, a click there. Shoplifting CDs is hard work. If you did that, you must know that you’re committing a crime. However, music sharing isn’t something new to the Internet. Back before cassette tapes, we had eight track tapes. Everybody did it when back in junior high school (everybody but me). However, it took time to do and it cost money to buy the tapes.

What about burning CDs? For that matter, businesses aren’t supposed to play CDs unless they pay some kind of licensing fee. I think that as easy as it is to share files, it’s that much easier for RIAA to go after you.

An interesting component to this whole thing is how RIAA originally supported their case with MediaSentry. It didn’t take too many law savvy people to start complaining about MediaSentry violating privacy rights. RIAA even stopped using MediaSentry in January 2009. I wonder how they’re checking up on all those file sharers now? Whom do they even choose to go after? I think they must have some sort of decision tree to help them decide whom to target.