RIAA sues wrong person

[clemsontiger]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...music_lawsuit_3

Music Industry May Have Sued Wrong Person
Wed Sep 24, 7:34 PM ET

By JUSTIN POPE, AP Business Writer

BOSTON - In a possible case of mistaken identity, the recording industry has withdrawn a lawsuit against a 66-year-old sculptor who claims never to have even downloaded song-sharing software, let alone used it.




Sarah Seabury Ward, of Newbury, Mass., and her husband use their computer to e-mail with children and grandchildren, said Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Cindy Cohn, who has worked with the family. They use a Macintosh (news - web sites), which cannot even run the Kazaa file-sharing service they are accused of using illegally.

Nonetheless, Ward was one of 261 defendants sued by the recording industry this month for illegal Internet file-sharing. Ward was accused of illegally sharing more than 2,000 songs, including rapper Trick Daddy's "I'm a Thug."

An attorney for the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) withdrew the case Friday, calling the move a "gesture of good faith" but writing in a letter to Ward's attorney that the organization would continue to look into the matter and reserved the right to refile.

RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said Wednesday the group believes the computer address — known as an Internet protocol (IP) address — provided by Comcast Corp., Ward's Internet service provider, is correct and the organization still believes it has the right account.

Cohn said she expects more cases like this to emerge, given the difficulties of tying IP addresses to particular individuals. She said Internet service providers like Comcast don't have enough IP addresses for each user, so they shuffle them around, and it is difficult to track which addresses were assigned to a particular account.

"This is what happens when you sweep away all the due process protections and all the privacy protections," Cohn said. "Those are the kinds of things that would stop this before it gets to the stage where you sue some nice old lady who did nothing wrong."

Comcast spokeswoman Sarah Eder declined to comment specifically on Ward's case, but said the company has helped the recording industry to match IP addresses with users' names, but only in cases where Comcast is legally bound to do so.

Ward's husband and attorney declined to comment.

Weiss said this was the only case the RIAA had withdrawn, but Cohn said her group was investigating several others that may involve mistaken identity. Cohn said more than half of the defendants who have contacted her group claim another member of their household was doing the file-sharing.

The RIAA certainly is willing to go directly after the offending family member, as in the case of Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old honors student from New York who was named as one of the 261 defendants. Her mother settled the case for $2,000 and an apology from Brianna.

[Dravyk]

An attorney for the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) withdrew the case Friday, calling the move a "gesture of good faith" but writing in a letter to Ward's attorney that the organization would continue to look into the matter and reserved the right to refile.

In other words .... "Since we fucked you over in our total incompetance, and are scared shitless you'd win a tremendous amount of money from us in a countersuit (plus create a precedence for more suites) we'll just run away while still postering we were right."

Business 101: Things not to do ...

Faced with competition (or a new mediium for piracy), and losing money, spend more than the amount of money you are already losing, increasing your losses, at the same time creating such hatred that you inspire more people to not spend money, causing you more losses, therefore answer that by throwing even great amounts of money at it with lawyers and court costs, to create still more enemies and have the public totally turn against you, all with the expectation that doing so will make you profitable again .... rather than leveraging the medium to your advantage, stemming losses, finding a new revenue source, and possibly becoming even more profitable.

[Peaches]

Tracking through IPs is going to be interesting. Back on the old board where it showed the IP address, there were many time that Wig and I showed the same IP. We both have DSL through the local phone company.

[Dravyk]

Originally posted by Peaches@Sep 25 2003, 07:07 AM
Tracking through IPs is going to be interesting. Back on the old board where it showed the IP address, there were many time that Wig and I showed the same IP. We both have DSL through the local phone company.

Similiar thing happened to me last week, Peaches. I was very briefly banned from my own programmers chat room! Turned out some IRC spammer had the same IP block as I. Think my programmer guy said there's only 256 people to a block. Just my luck someone from the same place, using the same DSL service was on the same server 8 hours before me causing trouble.

Can't wait to see what amazing flubs the billion dollar record industry is going to make in the near future. Maybe they'll accidently snag a US senator or someone, and then we'll see some really quick bill action in Congress, payola or no.

[sarettah]

Originally posted by Dravyk@Sep 25 2003, 08:09 AM
Think my programmer guy said there's only 256 people to a block.

There are 256 ip addresses to a block.....

This can equate to a lot more than 256 people.......

The max would be really hard to compute, but I know that my littler 4 port lynksys router will support up to 256 internal addressees connecting through one ip.....

so behind any one ip, especially businesses that typically carry one connection for multi users, could have many different users coming off of one ip at any one time.....

[Dravyk]

Thanks Sarettah for the explanation. That means the odds of the IRC thing improved greatly. Also means the RIAA can make bigger misses. LOL