Does she look like a music pirate?
04/26 2008 | 02:28 PM
Posted by: Janko Roettgers
That's the title of a Business Week piece about Tanya Andersen, the woman who prevailed in a file sharing lawsuit brought forward against her by the music industry and who is now suing the RIAA to stop the P2P lawsuit machine. Great weekend read, especially if you haven't kept up with all the nitty-gritty of the thousands of lawsuits the industry has started against file sharers in recent years. Here's a quick teaser:
"(Tanya Andersen's lawyer Lory R.) Lybeck figures that with all the potential errors in IP addresses collected by MediaSentry, the RIAA has gone after thousands of innocent people. He thinks the addresses could be erroneous as often as 20% of the time, which would mean 8,000 people wrongly accused. He believes that many innocent people have been coerced into paying because they can't afford to fight the RIAA in court."
"(Tanya Andersen's lawyer Lory R.) Lybeck figures that with all the potential errors in IP addresses collected by MediaSentry, the RIAA has gone after thousands of innocent people. He thinks the addresses could be erroneous as often as 20% of the time, which would mean 8,000 people wrongly accused. He believes that many innocent people have been coerced into paying because they can't afford to fight the RIAA in court."
Christopher wrote:
They need more evidence than just an IP address: they need the actual music on the drives, PROOF that the person downloaded the things illegally (and just having a p2p program on your machine is NOT proof enough for me or anyone I have talked to), etc.
The RIAA lost a big case here, and they are going to be paying for it for the next 10 years with decision after decision against them.... they would be better to just stick to cases against commercial pirates.