First RIAA Lawsuit to Head to Trial

mamer-retrogamer writes "Out of 14,800 lawsuits the RIAA has filed in the past two years, none have gone to court - until now. Patricia Santangelo, a divorced mother of five living in Wappingers Falls, New York, found herself the target of an RIAA lawsuit and vows to contest it. Santangelo claims that she knows nothing about downloading music online and the likely culprit is not her but a friend's child who used her computer. The RIAA disagrees."

Comments

Re:Song choices

[Seumas]

Right, because there are scands of thirteen year old girls out there downloading UB40.

The fact is, this chick doesn't have a leg to stand on. YOU are the parent and YOU are the owner of the house and YOU are responsible for what goes on there. You can prevent your daughter's teenage boyfriend from raping your pre-teen daughter with a little bit of observation and responsible parenting. You can prevent your child from doing lines of coke off the coffee table. You can prevent your childrens' friends from running a meth lab from your basement. You can prevent your children and their friends from watching porn over cable television. You can prevent a bazillion things and you can most certainly prevent (and even if you cant, then at least be responsible for) people doing illegal things on your computer in your house.

If this were anything other than computers and music, we'd be tearing this chick a new asshole for terrible parenting, lack of responsibility and so on.

Re:I'd like to see this go to a jury.

[EzInKy]

It demends on the circumstances - which is exactly what the lawyers did not want to hear. I can imagine circumstances where touching a toe might warrant a felony conviction.


In Kentucky crimes have degrees and such an offense would be a misdemeanor and the defendent might at worse get a 30 day suspended sentence if he had no prior history. Sure it may sound weird for someone to be convicted of touching a toe, but the defendent not only wasn't given consent he was actually told not to do it. If you haven't learned "to keep your hands to yourself" and that "no means no" by time that your an adult then the state owes you an education.