Lawyer: RIAA must pay back all $100M it has collected

[p2p rules]

Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson has now gotten involved in two more file-sharing lawsuits, including the Jammie Thomas retrial in Minnesota. But it's in the other, lesser-known case, that Nesson and a former student demand the RIAA pay back all $100 million it has collected in settlement money over the years.

Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is branching out.

For years he watched with horror as the RIAA demanded money from tens of thousands of Americans, finally getting into the ring himself when federal judge Nancy Gertner connected him to Joel Tenenbaum, a young man in need of an attorney for his file-sharing suit.

The move made waves that continue to ripple—the resources and legal minds of Harvard Law would wade into the controversy and provide a much needed counterweight to the crushing RIAA litigation machine! But critics noted that this was only a single case, and it only came after years of recording industry lawsuits. Didn't Harvard's privileged profs need to do more?

It turns out that Nesson is doing more. Though his main involvement is with the Tenebaum case—where he plans to argue that file-sharing is simply fair use—Nesson is also involved in two similar cases. In one of them, the lawyers are asking that the RIAA be forced to return all the money it has ever collected from the settlement campaign.

Ars Technica