The development of this case must be somehow surprising to RIAA. The organization has sued over 26,000 US citizens by now and all of them chose to settle for a few thousand dollars instead of taking matters further.

The 30-year-old single mother of two is accused of having illegally shared 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network and faces penalties of up to $1.2 million, plus the court and lawyer fees.

At first, Thomas was accused of sharing 1,702 songs through the Kazaa network. However, the numbers have been drastically cut since then to only 26 tracks, which SafeNet (the former Media Sentry) managed to download in February 2005.

The first round of the legal battle has already taken place. According to Ars Tehcnica, RIAA’s lawsuit spree against individual downloaders turned out to be a financial burden. Jennifer Pariser, Sony BMG’s the head of litigation, said during her testimony: "we’ve lost money on this program."

RIAA’s have been losing money on this program since 2003 and will most likely lose more if they keep it up. Threatening US citizens with lawsuits was considered to be an efficient way to prevent illegal downloads. In the mean time, the adoption of file-sharing programs increases year after year, so it’s pretty clear how successful this initiative was.