Some Austin music lovers got a temporary reprieve as an Austin court dropped a lawsuit against 250 people accused of file-sharing.
The Recording Industry Association of America filed four lawsuits over the last four months, accusing hundreds of people of illegally downloading music from file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and Grokster.
The RIAA sued groups of John and Jane Does identified by numerical IP addresses. The recording association asked U.S. District Court Judges Sam Sparks and Lee Yeakel for permission to obtain the names of the people they wished to sue from Internet service providers.
Sparks and Yeakel found this process improper and ordered the dismissal of all lawsuits except for the first defendant on the list in each of the four cases. This decision is unrelated to a lawsuit against former UT student Jason Gonzales, who was sued last year by the RIAA and agreed to settle.
The Nov. 17 ruling said the RIAA can only sue each person individually, and not in a group.
The RIAA has sparked controversy by suing individual users.
Larry Feldman, a spokesman for an anti-RIAA group, said the association will be forced to spend thousands of dollars more in filing fees if it decides to file individual lawsuits against the alleged file sharers.
The total filing fees for the four cases totaled $600, but it would have been $38,100 if each of the 254 cases were filed separately.
"That is a considerable loss of revenue to the public coffers," the judges said in the ruling.
Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, said the judges' ruling only applied to the process of filing lawsuits and had nothing to do with the underlying substance of the claims of copyright infringement.
He said the association will re-file the lawsuits in the near future in a way that would be "conducive and respectful of the court's wishes."
"This in no way deters or inhibits our plan to sue illegal file sharers to send a message of deterrence and help create an environment where legitimate online music businesses can flourish," Lamy said.
Feldman, a lawyer from Pennsylvania, said file sharing is legal and added that he would bet $1,000 to debate Lamy on the issue.
"Tell him anyone who says file sharing is illegal is a horse's ass," he said.
Feldman said the decision to lump the file-sharing lawsuits together was a shrewd business maneuver by the RIAA. He said that hypothetically, if 300 people are sued under one court filing, it might cost the association $1,000. If each defendant chose to settle at the national average of $3,000, the association would get $900,000.
Because of Sparks and Yeakel's decision, the lawsuits might cost the industry $300,000 instead of $1,000, Feldman said.
Five named defendants from Central Texas, including Gonzales, were sued last year by the RIAA but have opted out of appearing in court, paying between $3,000 and $6,000 each, said Thomas Butler, a lawyer who works for UT legal services.
Butler suspects RIAA officials tracked Gonzales down through the peer-to-peer program Kazaa. After Kazaa is installed, the default setting forces users such as Gonzales to share their files with everyone else using the program. How they discovered his identity through the program is a mystery to Butler.
Maybe through e-mail or through his IP address, Butler said. It wasn't something he and Gonzales were concerned with at the time of the lawsuit, he said.
"[His] aim was to try to minimize damage and protect himself as best he could," Butler said.
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