via Lawyers plan class-action to reclaim “$100M+” RIAA “stole” – Ars Technica.
Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.
The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged “$100+ million” it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.
Camara is attacking both the use of MediaSentry as an unlicensed private investigator and for using an illegal “pen register,” considered a type of electronic surveillence. Also, Camara maintains that the copyright registrations are not valid beciase they don’t contain the original recording and that the RIAA failed to produce certified copies.
Teaming up with Harvard Law professor and longtime RIAA foe Charles Nesson, Camara wants to take back all of the money the RIAA has extorted from people over the years by filing a class action suit. We’ll see if the claims made in the case at hand gain traction.
Jammie Thomas Rasset has been making headlines as a person who has been made an example of, who really doesn’t deserve it. Jammie Thomas Rasset has been sued by the RIAA for illegal downloading from Kazaa, and they want some instant cash to the tune of $1.9 million, for downloading 24 songs – 2 CDs worth. Intellectual property needs to be preserved, but given the history of the music industry, even a casual examination reveals that they only care about the gravy train, rather than the artist’s intellectual property, and many recording contracts give almost all licensing to the record companies, which is who is behind the huge need for cash advance loans of epic proportions for Jammie Thomas Rasset.