Tanya Anderson, my hero
March 15th 2008
For years, the music industry's attack dog, the RIAA, has sued consumers--children, grandmothers, dead people and generally anyone that wouldn't fight back--with impunity. They have gratuitously extorted millions from ordinary people for "copyright violations," but their methods for choosing who to sue and what happens to the money haven't been precisely known.
The reason for that is quite simple--whenever it looked like a defendant would be able to mount a successful defense, the RIAA would simply drop their suit and walk away before they the courts could force them to divulge their tactics, etc.
My hero
That's all about to the change because of Tanya Anderson (Ars), a single mother living in Oregon who was sued by RIAA back in 2005.
She eventually filed a counterclaim against the RIAA, and when the labels voluntarily dismissed their case against her last June, she filed a malicious-prosecution lawsuit. In it, Andersen accuses the RIAA of fraud, racketeering, invasion of privacy, libel, slander, deceptive business practices, and violations of the Oregon state RICO Act [wikipedia].
What will the result be? Assuming all goes well--we are talking about the legal system--the world will finally learn exactly what the RIAA's been up to which could lead to class action against the labels et al for their past and current actions.
As part of discovery, Anderson's lawyer will be able to dig into agreements between the RIAA, RIAA member companies, MediaSentry (the company that seeks out copyright infringers) and the Settlement Support Sentry (handles the money).
For example, "MediaSentry claims it is able to gain access to people's hard drives without their permission and collect information," said Lory Lybeck, Anderon's lawyer. "It's illegal because they're not licensed to do that work."
And, however egregious this one point is, it's expected to be just the tip of the iceberg.
I can't wait...
What's your take?
