To date, the RIAA has filed over 13,000 federal lawsuits against users suspected of illegally sharing out copyrighted music. Now, a 42-year-old divorced mother of five who is one of those being sued is refusing to settle. According to her, she is shocked about being sued for something she did not do as she not store music on her computer, let alone run the file sharing software Kazaa on it. The lawyers representing the music industry offered her a chance to settle for $7,500, later reducing this to $3,500, convinced that she did make copyrighted music available online.
As a result, she is determined to fight the RIAA in this case. Rogers, the lawyer she hired suspected this to be the first case where a defendant could fight the RIAA and possibly win their case. So far, several others have tried taking the RIAA to court over their lawsuit, but have failed to get judged in their favour. Many people who were sued that did not download or share out anything decided to settle in fear that they could owe several hundred thousand dollars if they lost their case.
According to Rogers, the RIAA use the same complaint when they file its lawsuits, apart from the name and said that this is too vague to stand of for what should be in a copyright case. As the RIAA just file lawsuits based on the identity of the IP addresses they gather, chances are that the owners of the connection may not be liable at all, for example, some person outside the home could be downloading using a wireless connection, unknown to the household.
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The 42-year-old divorced mother of five from Wappingers Falls, New York, didn't set out to be a trailblazer, but when she was served with a lawsuit late last year claiming songs had been illegally shared using her computer, there was no way she was going to pay up to make it go away. "I was shocked because I didn't understand how someone could be sued for something they didn't do. I didn't know what was going on," said Santangelo. "When [the RIAA's lawyers] called me, there was no music on my computer and they had an old IP address." Once the judge in the case suggested Santangelo hire a lawyer to help her case, she tapped New York's Morlan Ty Rogers, who quickly suspected that the case might be the first one in which a defendant could fight the RIAA, and maybe even win. |
I often heard of fraud caused by fraudsters sniffing people's wireless network traffic, however now we hear about the danger of getting sued just by leaving their network open to potential downloader's. Some people probably believe that if they tap into someone else's network that they will effectively become safe from the music industry since they don't have an ISP account, not realising the risk they are putting on the household (or business) that is providing the wireless network. Assuming this mother had a wireless network, this is likely what happened in this case.
Feel free to discuss and find out more about file sharing and its legal issues on our Music Download, Peer to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues forum.
Source: MTV News
