Woman Countersues RIAA for Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices

10/4/2005
by Ryan Paul
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051004-5382.html

There are two commodities that the RIAA has in great abundance: cash, and consumer resentment. Since the start of its concerted legal assault on digital media piracy, the RIAA has become a veritable pariah. Aggressive legal action against consumers doesn't exactly engender trust and respect, so it is no surprise that a casualty of the RIAA's war against piracy has decided to pursue retaliation. Tanya Anderson, a 42 year old disabled single mother from Oregon, has filed a countersuit against the RIAA, in which she claims that the organization engaged in numerous crimes, including fraud, deceptive business practices, and racketeering. In addition, she claims that RIAA has been "abusing the federal court judicial system for the purpose of waging a public relations and public threat campaign targeting digital file sharing activities."

Anderson, who was accused of downloading gangster rap via the Kazaa file sharing network under the login gotenkito, claims that she has never engaged in piracy. According to Anderson, shortly after she received notice of the suit, she was contacted by the Settlement Support Center, which claimed that a company called MediaSentry illegally infiltrated her computer and found evidence of copyright infringement. Anderson, who has no interest in gangster rap, contested the accusation and even requested that the Settlement Support Center inspect her computer to verify her innocence.

Brace yourselves, this is where it really starts to get freaky. In her countersuit, Anderson claims that the Settlement Support Center acknowledged the probability of her innocence, but informed her that should she refuse to settle, the RIAA would proceed with a suit in order to discourage others from attempting to defend themselves against unwarranted litigation.

Lets have a look at the countersuit:

Despite knowing that infringing activity was not observed, the record companies used the threat of expensive and intrusive litigation as a tool to coerce Ms. Andersen to pay many thousands of dollars for an obligation she did not owe. The record companies pursued their collection activities and this lawsuit for the primary purpose of threatening Ms. Andersen (and many others) as part of its public relations campaign targeting electronic file sharing.

The record companies have falsely represented and pleaded that information obtained in this invasive and secret manner is proof of Ms. Andersen's alleged downloading and distribution of copyrighted audio recordings. Ms. Andersen never downloaded music but has been subjected to public derision and embarrassment

If what she says is true, it means that the RIAA is using the threat of litigation to extort monolithic amounts of money from innocent consumers. The very prospect sends shivers down my spine, but is it true? Would the RIAA really attempt to defraud a disabled woman out of her meager social security income? If the RIAA does in fact perpetrate extortion on massive scale, it would constitute one of the most horrendous acts of large scale corporate fraud ever recorded and it would utterly annihilate the credibility of the politicians that have expressed support for the RIAA's anti-piracy efforts. Is the RIAA an evil empire driven by inhuman avarice, or is 42 year old Tanya Anderson a gangster rapping pirate in search of an easy way out?

Anderson isn't the only one crying foul. Employees of Kim's Video and Music Store in New York claim that they were wrongfully arrested in June on bogus piracy charges when New York Police Department officials and RIAA representatives raided the store. Econoculture, a web site devoted to the defense of modern music culture, has a chilling article containing numerous allegations of egregiously unlawful behavior purportedly perpetrated by the RIAA and law enforcement agents.

According to the article, the police officers may have confiscated CD-R discs legally produced and burned by independent artists, simply because the discs did not look like the legitimate, recorded CDs distributed by RIAA member companies:

RIAA regional officer Kenneth Rivera, who worked as an undercover agent on the Kim's case, identified the store's mix tapes and CDs as piratical, testifying in an affidavit that they "listed unfamiliar company names, do not display the name of the owner of the copyright, have packaging inferior in quality when compared with legitimate discs," and because "many are recorded on CD-R media. Legitimate recordings released by RIAA member companies do not release their recording on CD-R format."

Ironically, Rivera's breathless description of his pirate bounty sounds an awful lot like the run-of-the-mill product that any college band would put out as their own. The investigator obviously hasn't attended a basement show or visited a dance club in the last decade or two. One thing that readers can divine from his statement above is that he knows the CD-R format-the latest accessible recording tool-is allowing bands to bypass the label system altogether. That's a big no-no to RIAA's board of directors.

If the article is to be believed, it indicates that, in an attempt to crush their only competitors, the RIAA uses law enforcement agencies to wrongfully arrest individuals that legally distribute content produced by independent musicians!

The sheer depravity of it all inspires cynicism. If the RIAA is found guilty of fraud and extortion, I bet that SCO will sue them for infringement of a business methods patent.