Duluth, Minn. - A federal judge in Minnesota yesterday declared a mistrial in the copyright infringement lawsuit that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) brought against Jammie Thomas, the first American to be found guilty by a federal jury of illegal file-sharing, who was ordered to pay $222,000 the labels in damages. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said he erred in his initial jury instructions, which stated that Thomas should be found guilty regardless of whether or not it was proven that anyone downloaded the songs offered from her Kazaa account.

Los Angeles - Due to an accused file-swapper's actions to uninstall file-sharing software and reformat his hard drive, a federal judge has found he willfully destroyed evidence and is now subject to relevant sanctions, Ars Technica reported. Defendant Jeffrey Howell previously won a major victory in the case (Atlantic v. Howell), when Judge Neil V. Wake rejected the label's argument that his simply "making available" of songs in a shared folder on the Kazaa application constituted copyright infringement.

Duluth, Minn. - The federal judge presiding over the case of Jammie Thomas, the first person convicted by a jury of criminal copyright infringement of music on a file-sharing network, signaled during a proceeding on Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial in the case, according to coverage by Wired.com and others. The hearing was scheduled after the judge announced in May he may have made a "manifest error" when he instructed the jury that simply the "making available" of songs from Thomas' computer on Kazaa constituted infringement -- even if no actual distribution had been proven.

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.