GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us that the RIAA have had to withdraw a 300 million dollar lawsuit they filed against a 66 year old pensioner for file sharing after finding out that she never used any file sharing software!
The RIAA claimed that Sarah Ward shared around 2,000 songs over the Kazaa P2P application and filed a lawsuit at $ 150k per offending song. The lawsuit has now been withdrawn, but they told her that they reserve the right to re-file the lawsuit should they find any evidence. What makes matters worse is that her computer is Macintosh, which is incapable of running the Windows version of Kazaa.
The RIAA said Sarah Ward was sharing 2,000 songs through the KaZaA P2P network exposing her, at 150,000 dollars U.S. per offense, to 300,000,000 dollars in penalties. But not only had she never downloaded a song, but as a a Macintosh user, she couldn't even run the KaZaA software, which only runs on Windows. With characteristic bad grace, attorneys for the RIAA members reserved the right to harass the woman in future: "Please note, however, that we will continue our review of the issues you raised and we reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant," wrote Colin Zick, attorney for the record labels, the Boston Globe reports. Having attacked naval cadets, students, young children and now innocent senior citizens, the music business appears not to fear the consequences of its litigation. However, it can't afford too many more cases of mistaken identity. |
The RIAA should really check who they are targeting before filing a lawsuit. It is crazy that they can get away with suing young children, students and old age pensioners. With this case, either they issued a subpoena with the wrong IP address or the pensioner has managed to run secretly Kazaa on a Windows Emulator.
Source: The Register
