San Francisco - A group of ten law professors has filed a friend of the court brief, indicating they believe a judge erred when he told the jury in the file-sharing copyright infringement case against Jammie Thomas that simply the "making available" of songs in a shared folder on a computer constitutes copyright infringement, Wired.com reports. The "making available" claim is a key argument in the record labels' 20,000 copyright lawsuits against file-swappers.

In the first guilty verdict from a file-sharing case heard by a jury, Thomas was ordered in October to pay $222,000 for making 24 songs available on the Kazaa file-sharing network.

Judge Michael Davis last month stated, however, that he may have been wrong to instruct the jurors as he did, and invited briefs from the RIAA, Thomas' lawyers and other interested parties.

In their brief to the court, the professors -- from schools including Villanova, U. of Minnesota, U. of Virginia and Santa Clara -- argue that copyright law stipulates that a file must be distributed to count as infringement.

"More precisely, because a defendant 'distributes' in violation of [the law] only when she actually transfers to the public the possession or ownership of copies or phonorecords of a work, no distribution is effected merely by making a work available for distribution on a peer-to-peer network," the professors wrote.

A hearing on the issue has been set for August.

Related Links:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/professors-sidi.html

http://snipurl.com/2l9iu (PDF of Amicus Brief)