RIAA Defendant Cross-Sues Kazaa And AOL

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In what appears to be a first, RIAA defendant Michelle Santangelo, the 20-year old daughter of Patti Santangelo, has made a motion for leave to serve a third party complaint against Kazaa and AOL, as well as against someone who installed Kazaa software, in Elektra v. Santangelo II. Her proposed third-party complaint (pdf) alleges that any injuries plaintiffs might have sustained were the result of the third party defendants' "negligence and breaches... in the defective design of Sharman Network's program, "Kazaa" which was a dangerous instrumentality in its each and every use as it existed in 2002-2004; the trespassing and reckless installation by Matthew Seckler [the person who allegedly installed the software without authorization] of such program; the failure to warn by AOL and Sharman; the failure to block the downloading of such files by AOL; the improper blocking of alleged (RIAA) warning messages by AOL and Sharman; and, the secretive file sharing system of and by Kazaa.""

Comments

Oh, for the love of...

[Perseid]

Is everyone suing everyone for everything? It's getting to the point where if I hear about a lawsuit my first thought is that the plaintiff is trying to take advantage of someone. If that a sign that I'm an extreme cynic or that there's something really wrong out there?

WTF???

[photomonkey]

The speedometer on my Jeep goes up to 100mph. Does that mean that if I get pulled over doing 100mph in a school zone that it's Chrysler's fault and not mine? Did Chrysler take measures to prevent me from speeding in a school zone?

Generally, I'm excited when anyone fights the maFIAA, but in this case, I hope she loses badly so she'll learn about pointing fingers.

Re:WTF???

[whoever57]

Does that mean that if I get pulled over doing 100mph in a school zone that it's Chrysler's fault and not mine? Did Chrysler take measures to prevent me from speeding in a school zone?

My first thought was similar, but the complaint has an interesting point: AOL offers parental controls. If those controls don't keep your child from using the computer in an illegal manner, are they defective and does this make AOL liable?

To use your car analogy (usually a bad idea), Chrysler sells the car with a parental control which they claim will keep your kids out of trouble and your kids are stopped doing 100mph in a school zone, does Chrysler have any liability?

Re:WTF???

[Opportunist]

My computer runs anything that is a valid Win32 executable. Does that mean if I get infected with a trojan after double clicking something sent to me called invoice.pdf.exe that it's MS's fault and not mine? Did MS take measures to prevent me from running just any kind of program?

Sorry if it sounds like mockery, but in this case it's actually the case. We blame MS. We blame the trojan writer. We do not blame the clickmonkey who can't resist double clicking everything he sees. Why is that so? Why is it excusable to use zero brains when accessing a computer, claiming it's "too hard" or "too limiting" to take responsibility and instead blame the manufacturer of the system?

You have no idea how hard it was for me to write this, since I do blame MS for a lot of things, many rightfully, but they are actually only partly responsible for the amoung of malware currently circulating. Until the advent of MPack, nearly all widely spread malware used user stupidity as the key attack vector, requiring user interaction and actual "help" from the user to infect a system. Why is the user not liable for stupidly clicking everything he sees?

umm, no

[cyphercell]

the failure to block the downloading of such files by AOL;

No, AOL should not block files that I am downloading at all.

This would set TERRIBLE FUCKING PRECEDENT

[karmaflux]

I hope this chick loses. If she wins this idiotic suit, it would set legal precedent that it's the ISP's responsibility to police its users. That's just about the worst possible idea ever.

She sort of has a point. at least on some of it.

[Eskarel]

For one, if she didn't install or knowingly use the software it's questionable whether she's responsible.

Second Kazaa as it once existed tended to at least attempt(if you didn't actively tell it not to, which if she didn't install it she didn't get a chance to choose) to share pretty much every music file on your PC. If she had a legitimate music file on her PC Kazaa would have attempted to share it with the outside world leading to infringement. This was always bad design in every program tham implemented it(it's alright in a media player, but not in a file sharing utility, it'd be like having apache automatically make all your documents available.

Thirdly the RIAA is presumably alleging that they sent warning e-mails to this girl or her parents, and the girl and/or her parents are apparently alleging that they didn't get them. The suit against the ISP means that the ISP will be required to prove whether those e-mails got through or not and wether they ever got to them in the first place. If they did block them then there's a case there, if they didn't arrive then the RIAA loses their "she knew it was wrong and kept going" angle and look more like vultures going after a little girl who didn't know what she was doing.

Her suit about the ISP blocking the files is of course bollocks and should and likely will be tossed out(presuming that the ISP wasn't offering some sort of parental filtering service at cost in which case there's a case there too).

Re:I disagree...

[Lesrahpem]

I think ISP's fall more along the lines of something like a telephone company. Does the telephone company get in trouble if you use their service to make prank calls? No, not as long as they assist the police when someone misuses their service.

Re:Rights Based Society

[number11]

It's hardly secretive though. The icon is in the system tray at least.

The average user (who doesn't read /.) doesn't have a clue what all that crap on the system tray is. Take the average consumer computer that comes with all those convenient preloaded programs, it's got about 25 tiny inscrutible icons down there, the only one they've figured out is the clock. Maybe. So they ignore all that stuff.

And half the time Windows hides those icons anyhow.