Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman who was recently fined $220,000 for illegal file sharing, is to appeal against her loss.

Interestingly, the woman was convicted for allowing access via Kazaa to shared music files on her PC and not for illegally downloading said music files.

In Spain in the last year or so a precedent was set in a case against a man accused of illegally downloading music. The case was thrown out after the Judge claimed that as long as the defendant was keeping the files for his own use and not sharing them, selling or giving them away, he was not breaking the law.

The way I see it is that we can download to our hearts content, even through peer 2 peer networks such as Kazaa, but we can’t allow others to download them from us.

Of course those that do download music from the internet need a source to feed from, and ultimately that is from shared files. So we appear to have a catch22 situation.

It will be interesting to see whether Jammie Thomas can reverse the original verdict, and what affect it may have on the illegal music download industry, in particular with the P2P networks.