Walt Crawford has published "Catching Up with the RIAA" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.
Here's an excerpt:
Briefly, Jammie Thomas was the defendant in the first case where an RIAA filesharing infringement suit actually went to a jury—despite RIAA's best efforts to avoid that happening. Thomas seemed like a sympathetic defendant: Single mother, Native American. But her IP address was attached to a KaZaA account offering more than 1,700 recordings with a user name she'd apparently used for years on several different accounts…and shortly after receiving a settlement letter from RIAA, Thomas had Best Buy replace the hard drive in her PC. And, under questioning, said it had been replaced a year earlier. To make a long story short—up to October 2007, at least—the jury found her guilty, not surprising given the evidence in the case. The judgment was for $220,000. She appealed the decision, in part based on a claimed flaw in the jury instructions. That's where things stood at the time of the earlier article.
Court activities can sometimes seem to be in very slow motion. Most of this article brings things up to date on the Thomas case—and, so you're not too surprised, it's not over yet. (There's other stuff about RIAA and copyright at the end of the article—but the Jammie Thomas saga is fascinating.)
