Los Angeles - A federal judge has sided with the argument of a 16-year-old girl who claimed she had no knowledge or understanding of file-sharing or copyright infringement, and ruled she will only have to pay $200 per song, instead of the $750-30,000 allowed under the Copyright Act, Ars Technica reported.

Whitney Harper admitted to using Kazaa back in 2004, but claimed she thought it was akin to an online radio station, and did not realize her actions were illegal -- making her incapable of intentionally infringing copyrights.

The labels had argued that the copyright warning on a CD should have sufficed, but Judge Xavier Rodriguez noted that "in this case, there were no compact discs with warnings," concluding that "Plaintiffs have not introduced any evidence to contradict that Defendant did not have an understanding of the nature of file-sharing programs and copyright sophisticated enough to have reason to know that her actions infringed Plaintiffs' copyrights."

Harper is now on the hook for the 37 songs the recording industry sued her over, or a total of $7,400.

Ars Technica notes that, had Harper settled out of court after receiving a pre-litigation letter from the RIAA, she would likely have paid about $4,000.

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http://snipurl.com/3ev9z (Ars Technica)