Sep
5
2003

more legal stuff

“nycfashiongirl,” whom the RIAA has accused of music piracy, has enlisted lawyers to fight back. The Associated Press reports that her legal team plans to question the legitimacy — and legality — of the RIAA’s efforts to track her. (Wired: “Was Computer Search Illegal?” - 09/03/03)

In court papers, the lawyers said they may argue that the RIAA violated state and federal laws by intercepting the woman’s Internet address as its investigators scoured file-sharing networks looking for songs to download…

The defense team said it also may argue that the music industry was improperly affiliated with law enforcement and thus its perusal of music files on the woman’s computer violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Matt Oppenheim, RIAA’s vice president … said the RIAA was not affiliated with law enforcement, so restrictions against unreasonable searches do not apply.

The lawyers’ arguments raise some interesting legal questions. Is the RIAA empowered to identify and investigate potential copyright infringers, acting in lieu of law enforcement? And are the RIAA’s means of doing so themselves illegal?

It’ll be interesting to see how everything plays out.

Posted at 8:15 PM in music, technology

Previous entry: registration (online news) | Next entry: joy of cooking (food)

Post a comment

As a spam-control measure, your comment may require my approval before it will appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting. To avoid the moderation delay, consider filling in your e-mail address. It won't appear on the site, but I use it to whitelist frequent commenters so their comments appear automatically.


The following HTML tags are permitted (if you want to use them):
p, br, a href, b, strong, u, i, em, ol, ul, li, cite, blockquote