Leave Kazaa, AOL out, demands RIAA
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA has been putting the Santangelo family through the wringer ever since the day Patti Santangelo, a New York mother of five, had the temerity to stand up to them.
They did everything they could to force her to confess to the non-existent crime of filesharing, accusing her of being an illegal massive online distributor of copyrighted music.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Like so many RIAA victims, Patti didn’t even begin to have the technical knowledge and expertise which would have been called for had she been the criminal the RIAA said she was.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) knew there was absolutely no merit to the charge, but it persisted anyway, putting Patti and her children through needless anguish.
Eventually, Patti prevailed and the RIAA – the unhappy focal point of a first-of-its-kind class action brought by another victim, this time a disabled woman in Oregon – immediately turned on two of her children, Michelle and Bobby —— as had been its intention from the very first, and which is now standard organised music cartel operating procedure.
However, Michelle, who’s currently the principal target, is showing she has as much grit as her mother, refusing to cave in to constant attacks from the Big 4 enforcer and its hired legal guns.
Like her mother, she’s demanding a trial by jury to force the RIAA out into the light where it’ll have to justify its allegations in full view of the public, something it’s strenuously trying to avoid.
Now the RIAA has filed papers in Elektra v Santangelo II to try to have her application to include Kazaa and AOL as third party defendants quashed, says Recording Industry vs The People.
As p2pnet posted:
… Michelle launched a third party action against Sharman Networks’ Kazaa, the p2p file sharing software implicated in the vast majority of the RIAA sue ‘em all cases and which is itself the subject of a class action.
Michell also named former family friend Matthew Seckler, and AOL.
Says her court document:
Kazaa operates in the background of one’s computer, seizing information and bandwidth unknown to the user or owner, recklessly disregarding copyright laws and ensnaring unsuspecting users into unintended sharing (as well as creating entire classes of unknowing violators – the parents, for allowing the ‘illegal’ activity to take place not just in the ‘North 40′ of their hard drive, but ‘underground’ because Kazaa’s activity is automatically buried so as to avoid detection; and, the children – such as Defendants herein, who, in listening to their own, rightly-purchased CD’s unknowingly become distributing pirates). Kazaa also blocked the RIAA’s alleged warning notices to unsuspecting users.
Seckler, “loaded the offending program (Kazaa) onto the Santangelo computer without permission” and, “was a trespasser or violator of any conceivable license he might have claimed,” say Santangelo and her lawyer, Jordan Glass.
AOL, meanwhile, “had the opportunity to filter out this material and, in particular, because it is intertwined with Time-Warner, an entertainment behemoth: AOL knew of the industry’s concerns and had already provided certain filters and parental controls (’Controls’) but did not allow the RIAA’s alleged warning messages to pass through such filters”.
It also, “failed to use its Controls to prevent illegal downloading, even though it had the information, superior knowledge, ability, skill, techniques, tools, power and authority to prevent such downloading”.
“Through extensive investigation and litigation in a suit fraud against Patricia Santangelo, Plaintiffs were able to determine the defendants, Patricia Santangelo’s children, were direct infringers with respect to the 1,322 audiophiles being distributed from defendants computer,” claims the RIAA in a 19-page court document.
Michell was 16 at the time this was supposed to have happened, and Bobby was only 12.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
stand up to them – RIAA victim talks to p2pnet, September 4, 2005
first-of-its-kind class action – RIAA named in first class action, August 16, 2007
Recording Industry vs The People – RIAA Opposes Michelle and Bobby Santangelo Motion to Add Kazaa and AOL as third party defendants, August 29, 2007
subject of a class action – Michelle Santangelo vs the RIAA, July 18, 2007
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August 30th, 2007 at 11:17 am
File-sharing equivalent in the real world: a person in a library always leaves their favorite book on a small table beside a freely usable copy machine. Someone else walks up to the book while the owner’s not really paying any attention and copies off the entire book with the copy machine, and walks off with the freely made copy of the book.
Santangelo equivalent in this situation: the book author sues the owner of that copy of the book because they “made it available” by putting it on a table next to a copying machine.
Using that analogy, there is no way in hell a jury would give the case to the RIAA.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
They made their WHOLE CASE against her because they claimed that she downloaded illegal music files FROM Kazzaa…and NOW they don’t want her to talk about Kazzaa because it might not look good for them?
What a bunch of hypocrytes!
August 30th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
If the whole case hinges on the fact that this material was made available on Kazza, how can they possibly have a case for excluding discussion of it in the case?
Clear and obvious nonsense.