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If you haven't heard of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, she's the defendant in the very first music piracy legal case against an individual. The Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) won the second of two trials against Thomas-Rasset, who was found guilty of willfully infringing copyright on 24 songs.

The minimum penalty per track according to the law is $750, and if found guilty, Thomas-Rasset would have had to pay a minimum total of $18,000. The first trial saw the jury find Thomas-Rasset guilty, making her obligated to pay $9,250 per track (a total penalty of $222,000). But the judge declared it a mistrial because he had given the jury incorrect instructions.

Back then, the jury found Thomas-Rasset guilty because of her inconsistent defenses. She had claimed that a file-sharing hack had hijacked her Wi-Fi connection, causing her to end up with the 24 tracks through the file-sharing medium Kazaa. This could have been a valid defense, but there was one problem with it -- she didn't have a Wi-Fi router.

The second trial had a different jury, but her defense was equally suspicious -- this time, Thomas-Rasset claimed that her children may have used her computer to file-share through Kazaa.

Rrriiight.

The prosecution later on presented the paper trail of evidence that led to her computer -- the MAC address of her cable modem and PC's Ethernet port were correctly identified. Her Kazaa username also gave her away. The deathblow probably came with the fact that she replaced her computer's hard drive -- and didn't tell this to the investigators.

The jury apparently realized she was lying, and were "angry about it." They went on to find her guilty and slap her a whopping $80,000 penalty per track, bringing the total fine to $1.92 million.

The story has touched off a nerve in the blogosphere. Mixed opinions, some venting anger at the jury while others claiming the fine sounded fair, are flying everywhere. But no matter what anyone says, it would seem that the RIAA is winning the war on music piracy.

Or is it?

Personally, I think the RIAA won't push to collect $1.92 from Thomas-Rasset -- it's more likely they'll offer to settle the case out of court. With the grassroots anger it'll stoke if it tried to collect, it might shoot itself in the foot and hamper their future campaigns against piracy. Let's wait and see.