Duke’s Note:

In 2005, Tanya Anderson was sued by the RIAA, but she beat em. And if you don’t know, now she’s hitting back with her own lawsuit, perhaps to teach em a lesson. The charges? Malicious prosecution, libel, slander, fraud and racketeering (among other things). It’s a start.

Bad news though: As Eric Bangeman reports from ARS Technica, there’s been a snag in the form of Judge Anna Brown’s decision that the RIAA had good legal reason to sue.

As part of her malicious-prosecution lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, Andersen argued that the RIAA should never have brought suit against her in the first place in part because the labels and MediaSentry had no way of knowing who was actually behind the computer when the MediaSentry investigator detected KaZaA user gotenkito’s shared folder. As a result, the lawsuit against Andersen—and by implication every other person targeted by the RIAA—was “sham litigation,” and therefore not protected by the First Amendment.

Not so, said Judge Brown, noting the way in which IP addresses have been linked to individual users by ISPs upon being served by subpoenas. “On this record, the Court concludes Defendants could have reasonably believed there was a chance that their copyright-infringement claims against Plaintiff might have been ‘held valid upon adjudication’ on the basis of the link between gotenkito’s shared folder and the IP address leased to Plaintiff in light of the many cases in which such a link has been held to be sufficient to support probable cause to initiate an action for copyright infringement,” reads the ruling.

Good news: The initial lawsuit may have been legal, but the (metaphorical) jury’s still RIAA’s conduct after filing suit (which apparently included harassing Anderson’s 8-year-old daughter).

Other good news: According to Torrent Freak the RIAA has agreed to pay Anderson’s $107,951.00 legal fees. That’s $107,834.00 principle, plus the interest that built up. And here I was starting to think the RIAA had no class. Lesson learned…

Biggup to Eric Bangeman for following this story.

See case documents at Recording Industry VS the People

Technorati Tags: Anderson V Atlantic, ARS Technica, Eric Bangeman, RIAA, Tanya Anderson

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