Jammie Thomas-Rasset owes $1.92 million to the music industry. It stems from losing a copyright infringement suit brought against her by the Record Industry Association of America because she illegally used the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing service to share files of copyrighted songs.

This Minnesota housewife could have gotten off easy if she had settled with the association like thousands who had shared copyrighted music via illegal file sharing services. They often paid $3,000 to $5,000 to settle.

But Ms. Thomas-Rasset held strong, initially losing and being ordered to pay $222,000 in October 2007. That decision was thrown out, and the subsequent decision was even worse for her.

When these types of cases were first starting to come to public attention, Ms. Thomas-Rasset might have gotten a lot of sympathy as the poor uneducated consumer being bullied by the big bad corporations. But the tide has turned -- in part because the public is becoming smarter about the way people should act.

As youths, we had tape recorders and liked music, too.

The difference is that we made the recordings for ourselves, something that was later deemed acceptable as fair use of copyrighted works. Some of us might even have recorded an extra copy for a friend. It wasn't malicious; but I suppose the way digital music has been shared is not usually malicious either.

The big difference is that it's now much cheaper to make the copies -- or in the case of music-sharing services -- to allow others to make their own copies. Now that copies can be made in large quantities, it is having a real impact on the people who own the copyrights.

We need to teach our teens (and preteens) about how far they should be willing to go when sharing music or similar works. Adults such as Ms. Thomas-Rasset should have the good sense to know what's right and wrong, without being told.

It's hard to believe there isn't at least a touch of maliciousness provoking Ms. Thomas-Rasset to go the legal route. In court, it came out that she used a password-protected Kazaa account -- only she knew the password and username/nickname that she had used for 16 previous years.

It also was revealed that she replaced her hard disk drive after receiving the infringement notice from RIAA lawyers, and submitted the new disk drive as evidence that she had not infringed. This contradicted her earlier testimony that she had not replaced her hard drive since before the alleged infringement period.

If you think she was simply naïve, you probably don't know that this woman who claims to never had heard of Kazaa wrote a paper about Napster (which was then also an illegal file sharing service) while in college.

Now, CNET reports she has found a loophole in bankruptcy laws that might allow her to get the $1.9 million debt dismissed.

She's working hard to get out from under the consequences of doing the wrong thing, but she's apparently making all the wrong moves. Those moves started with doing the wrong thing to start -- sharing the music illegally. I'm just glad it's so easy to buy digital music cheaply now -- there's less incentive for people to share the way she did.