[Commons-Law] RIAA Sues Dead People

[Prashant Iyengar]

Found this amusing piece at http://www.corante.com/copyfight/ - the 
"Copyfight" blog.
Regards,
Prashant

February 06, 2005
RIAA Sues Dead People
Not at all surprising. In fact, it could even be amusing, since in this case 
no one but the RIAA has to pay for its mistake:

Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83 
year-old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 
songs available on the internet.

"I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do 
it to appropriate people and not dead people," Robin Chianumba told AP. "I am 
pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the 
hearing."

Needless to say, this is not the way it usually goes. Most RIAA targets are 
alive and well, and must deal with the consequences of being sued by a group 
that has fought in court to make the process quick and painless -- for the 
RIAA.

Due process is, after all, sort of inconvenient. Why not round up all of the 
people you want to sue in one big, easy-to-bulldoze group? So what if their 
cases have nothing to do with one another, or the ISP you want information 
from is a couple states away from a target's jurisdiction? And what's all 
this nonsense with having to present a court with actual evidence of 
wrongdoing before you can strip an Internet user of her anonymity? Whatever 
happened to guilty until proven innocent?

In fact, the RIAA doesn't usually meet much resistance to its 
round-'em-up-and-shoot lawsuits. As this Daily Texan article reports, it can 
usually skip right to the good part: collecting the settlement fee:


It was an ingenious plan: Lawyers would pay around $200 in court fees to 
subpoena an ISP into revealing the owners of a list of IP addresses the RIAA 
had accumulated. Before November, the RIAA was able to gather around 50 
identities per subpoena. Assuming each person received a letter with a phone 
number to a similar settlement center, and each person decided to pay a 
little now instead of a lot later by settling, and each person settled for 
the then-average $3,000, then for $200 the RIAA could make an easy $150,000.


I can count on at least a few Copyfight readers to respond with, "So what? 
Isn't copyright infringement illegal? Someone has to pay for the damage 
infringement is doing to the record labels -- why not the people accused of 
the crime?"

...
(Truncated from the orginal piece. You can read it at 
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/.)