The Recording Industry Association of America has eventually won over Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman that it accused of having shared about 1,700 music tracks by breaking the copyright laws. This lawsuit’s verdict has been very important because it has marked the first time when a copyrighted files illegal sharer has been pulled out of the Internet’s anonymity and charged with such accusations.

But, why has Jammie Thomas thought in fact that she will win this legal battle? The woman has always maintained her innocence and she has even negated she had a Kazaa account. Despite these facts she has eventually lost and has now to pay $222,000 for her guilt; if she had accepted a settle out of court for the first time, she would have had to pay at least a smaller amount of money.

So, it seems that there have been about four main reasons for which the RIAA has been able of successfully building its case against Jammie Thomas. First of all, it seems that the RIAA has been able of matching a username and an IP address with the 30-year-old woman. Although Thomas’ lawyer has even invoked a possible IP address spoofing, it has been the fact that Thomas has used the same nickname for both her Hotmail and Kazaa accounts that has helped RIAA a lot.

Secondly, there have been the RIAA’s jury instructions that have helped the group a lot in its case. Although the defense has also submitted jury instructions it seems that RIAA’s one have been more important. They have eventually become Jury Instructions 14 and 15:

Jury Instruction No. 14: The act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners' exclusive reproduction right.

Jury Instruction No. 15: The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the copyright owners, violates the copyright owners' exclusive right of distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.

Furthermore, it has been important that the jury has also listened to RIAA’s instruction, when they’ve decided that RIAA does not need to offer any evidence that the other Kazaa user have actually downloaded the songs from Thomas’ computer. The only thing that has had to be taken into account has been the fact that Thomas left the songs in a publicly accessible directory, from where they could have been downloaded.

So, after these explanations that could be found behind the federal jury’s decision of punishing Jammie Thomas, one could rightfully conclude that the copyright issue has started to gain more and more importance.