The RIAA scored a win in its war on P2P music downloaders on Thursday. A Duluth, Minnesota, court ruled in favor of the recording industry and ordered Jammie Thomas to pay a US$222,000 fine for pirating 24 copyrighted songs, according to the Duluth News Tribune.

Ms. Thomas, a 30 year old single mother of two, had been accused by the recording industry of using the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing service to distribute songs over the Internet. RIAA lawyers claimed that her Internet IP address, computer media access control address, and personal user name were all linked to the shared files.

Plaintiff lawyers also alleged the since she had a bachelor’s degree in business administration, she was a proficient computer user.

Ms. Thomas claimed she didn’t know what the KaZaA service was. Her attorney added that someone could have been using her IP address to mask their own file sharing activities.

The recording industry along with Sony BMG, Arista Records, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings, Capitol Records and Warner Brothers Records, presented their case without ever using the hard drive from Ms. Thomas’s computer. About two weeks after she was first contacted by the RIAA about her alleged music sharing, she replaced her hard drive and claimed the original was defective.

The lawsuit against Ms. Thomas is the first of its kind to reach a verdict, and could set a precedent for future RIAA music sharing litigation. The record labels were able to mount a case without any physical evidence, which could make it easier for record labels to win future suits against alleged file sharers.