Report: RIAA Has Wrongly Sued "Hundreds" of File-Swappers

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 4, 2005 - 3:14am.

San Francisco - Wired News on Tuesday cited legal experts who said "hundreds" of people are being wrongly sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for copyright infringement on file-sharing networks. Last week, a judge in Michigan dismissed a RIAA lawsuit against a woman who claimed the file-sharing was done by one of her children, and that the RIAA engaged in abusive behavior to try to get her to settle. "My impression is that the majority of those sued are innocent," Ray Beckerman, an attorney with Beldock Levine & Hoffman, told Wired News. "What really rankled me is the bullying tactics they use, and I don't like bullies. Prior to retaining lawyers, when (defendants) talk to the settlement support center, they are threatened with criminal prosecution, ruin of their credit, publication of their names." Some say that many of the IP addresses the RIAA collected from anonymous file-swappers, and later connected to Internet account owners through ISPs, have been matched with the wrong individuals. An RIAA spokeswoman told Wired News the RIAA has "complete confidence in the litigations we have filed and in the judicial process to resolve the issues raised in those cases." The RIAA has sued over 14,000 file-swappers for copyright infringement, and has so far settled some 3,300 of those cases out of court.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68951,00.html
http://p2pnet.net/story/6445
http://info.riaalawsuits.us/priority_chan/chan_order_1.pdf
http://www.riaa.com