RIAA Fires Back Against Legal Protest From File Sharer

from the the-pre-battle dept

Last week we had the story of a file sharer suing the RIAA for violating her privacy by sending a subpoena for her info to Verizon without letting her respond. Now the RIAA has responded and is attacking the woman on many fronts. In response to the privacy claim, the RIAA says that she does have the right to appeal the subpoena, but she needs to do it immediately. Not exactly sure what the legal rationale is for that. However, even more interesting is that they spend much of the brief arguing about what a big downloader she is - when that has absolutely nothing to do with the legal question being argued. They point to all the files they found while poking through her hard drive (admitting that they checked out a lot more than they mention in the original subpoena). They also say that many of the songs have a "fingerprint" suggesting they were downloaded years ago off of Napster. Of course, the woman's response (or rather, her lawyer's) is that she bought a used computer that had those files on it, ripped some of her own music legally, and was using Kazaa to listen to the songs. They also claim she tried but was unable to turn off the file sharing on Kazaa. To be honest, both of these arguments sound a little weak to me - and I wonder why both sides don't save such arguments for any actual lawsuit. Still, the response does raise the question of how the RIAA will prove that a specific person was responsible for the music being shared.