Or there's another way to look at it. Thomas was caught with her pants down, she's clearly guilty, and she did everything she could to antagonize the system.
1. Like all RIAA defendants, she was offered the chance to settle for a few thousand. She refused and goaded the RIAA into taking her to court.
2. Once in court, she played games by lying about the circumstances behind her missing hard disk drive. She, nonetheless, continued to protest her innocence despite overwhelming evidence she wasn't.
3. She lost in court, was given a penalty that while high, was actually on the lower end of the possible outcomes. Nonetheless she could have appealed the penalty, and would probably have had a fair hearing, but decided instead to appeal the ruling that she was guilty instead on the basis of a dubious technicality which was unlikely to change the final jury verdict.
4. She's lost in court a second time. This time, she was caught being blatantly dishonest. The jury is almost certainly looking at this seeing someone try to mislead them, who's wasted their time with a pointless retrial over something she's clearly guilty of.
Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, was anything other than a ****ed jury increasing the damages award ever likely to be the outcome of this case? Short of a jury of 12 Slashdot copyright infringement advocates advocating jury nullification, I can't see how any other result was ever possible.
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