Oregon Attorney General resists RIAA tactics against file sharers
By Dave Parrack
The Oregon state Attorney General’s office this week filed an appeal to the U.S. District Court calling for an immediate investigation in to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the tactics it employs when going after alleged illegal file sharers.
Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers has already resisted attempts by the RIAA to force the University of Oregon to reveal the names of 17 alleged music sharers, and is now seemingly ramping up the challenge to their claims.
According to PC World, Oregon’s assistant attorney general, Katherine Von Ter Stegge filed a 15 page brief on Wednesday which stated that, while the RIAA are right to use their powers to try and stop copyright infringement, the process has to be “tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process.”
The brief also questioned the RIAA’s data mining techniques, insisting that the RIAA could only show a potential for misuse and not actual misuse of copyrighted music files. This stems from the fact that the RIAA only has evidence of their being copyrighted files, and the software present to share them illegally, but no evidence of where the files came from, or if they were passed on afterwards.
The brief even questions the investigators right to attain such information in the first place, accusing them of illegally accessing and uploading private confidential information not related to copyright infringement.
The RIAA has been issuing subpoenas to universities and Internet service providers insisting that they hand over the identities of people it suspects of file sharing. Oregon University seem to be the first to put up a fight, claiming that because of double occupancy dorms, and other mitigating circumstances, they couldn’t be sure that the students who had been assigned those IP addresses were actually the ones who had committed copyright infringements.
This seems to be the opening salvo in what could turn out to be an important case for the future conduct of the RIAA, and for file sharing online. If the RIAA’s bully boy tactics are deemed irresponsible, or even illegal, they may have to change their techniques, or even whole stance against who they conceive or irrevocably damaging the music industry.
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