It seems the RIAA copyright nazis are once again trying to use their financial muscle to bully yet another victim into submission.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/riaa-decries-te.htmlThe Recording Industry Association of America is labeling a Texas woman "vexatious" for her refusal to pay the record labels $7,400 for allegedly infringing 37 songs on the Kazaa file sharing network.
Instead, 22-year-old Whitney Harper is demanding a jury trial. The Texas Tech student wants a federal judge to consider the mistrial in the Jammie Thomas case. In that case, the nation's only file sharing lawsuit to go to trial, a Minnesota federal judge declared a mistrial after concluding he wrongly instructed jurors that simply making music files available on a peer-to-peer network constituted infringement.
The RIAA has agreed to accept $200 per track instead of the usual base of $750 under the Copyright Act because the woman is claiming an innocent infringement defense. The Copyright Act, which carries penalties of up to $150,000 per track, allows penalties as low as $200 for innocent infringement defenses — in this case a teenager claiming she was clueless about what she was doing.
Whitney has admitted to downloading Kazaa and music when she was between 14 and 16 years old.
The recording industry still dont seem to understand that attacking children, old folks and the sick because they have no revenue to defend themselves is just not socially or morally acceptable, it is after all the work of the lowest scum, a word often invoked when discussing Cary Sherman and his RIAA compatriots.
