“For nearly three years of her life, Tanya Andersen and her young daughter were subjected to an outrageous series of baseless accusations and unrelenting threats of financial ruin.”

Well, it’s not Kafka but it’s fun reading nontheless. It’s the first line of a 110-page legal brief, the opening shot in a class-action suit against the RIAA’s jihad against file-sharing. (Link via Slashdot.)

Tanya Andersen is the fortysomething mother of a ten-year-old; the RIAA says she downloaded “Fuck Y’all Hoes” and other songs. It seems the company made a mistake in her case, but Andersen’s protests, according to the brief, were never given creedence. She filed a malicious persecution suit against the RIAA, and that action is now being proposed as a class action.

The rest of the first graf of the brief lives up to its first sentence:

For nearly three years of her life, Tanya Andersen and her young daughter were subjected to an outrageous series of baseless accusations and unrelenting threats of financial ruin. The world’s four major recording studios had devised an illegal enterprise intent on maintaining their virtually complete monopoly over the distribution of recorded music. The enterprise is conducted with total disregard for innocent individuals. Dead people have been sued. Children have been sued. People without computers have been sued. As a senior RIAA spokeswoman explained: “When you fish with a net, you are going to catch a few dolphins”. By their own early admission, they were knowingly engaged in a “driftnet fishing” operation and “innocent dolphins” were the collateral damage in their “nets”.

But it’s really not about the dolphins. The case is against the entire operation. Basically, the filing portrays it this way:

1) The RIAA, through a company called MediaSentry, sweeps the file-sharing networks and logs the IP addresses of users with copyrighted material in their sharing folders. (The IP address is basically a unique number the computer gives itself to identify itself on the Internets.)

2) It then files mass “John Doe” lawsuits against, essentially, the IP numbers, and subpoenas the users’ internet service providers en masse to get their names.

3) The organization then sends the users demand letters, saying essentially “you have already been sued,” and demanding a $4,000 or $5,000 fine within ten days.

4) According to the filing, the organization says it has proof the user committed copyright violations and that he or she could owe “hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to the RIAA.”

4) The RIAA then sets up a boiler room staffed by retired police officers to make follow-up calls to get them agree to the fine.

5) The organization then proceeds with the bulk lawsuits against anyone who doesn’t settle.

The filing’s overheated prose is exceedingly enjoyable to read even when it’s almost incomprehensible. (“The RIAA’s primary function is to act however it decides is necessary to maintain its monopoly.”) And it’s hard to argue with the suit’s overarching themes:

[T]echnology advances during the last 10 years have rendered [the RIAA’s] antiquated model for music production and distribution virtually useless and obsolete. MP3 music storage
and players are now over 10 years old. Musicians can now self-publish, self-produce and
distribute their art to their fans and customers without the burden of the enormous and unfair
payments demanded by the RIAA companies. Music consumers can buy only the music they
want. The actions of the RIAA and the Big 4 in their desperate attempt to maintain their
monopoly have caused great harm to the courts, consumers and significantly to the artists they
purport to represent.

Not everything in the filing makes complete sense: The reason MediaSentry, for example, can peer into file-sharers’ hard drives is that the very nature of file-sharing leaves those drives open to inspection. In effect, a program like LimeWire says, “Hey, Joe’s computer here has the new Beck album if you want to download it.”

Hard to complain if someone comes along and points out that it might be illegal to do that. It’s sort of like a fence caught selling hot goods at a garage sale who then argues the cops needed a search warrant.

That said, the filing also bangs at a couple of other seeming vulnerabilities in the way the RIAA has manhandled the court system. For one, judges already have thrown RIAA suits out on the grounds that MediaSentry wasn’t licensed to do the investigative work that produces the IP addresses. And still to be resolved is the question of whether merely having downloaded songs available for downloading (as opposed to being caught in the actual act) is criminal in and of itself.