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RIAA suit sparks controversy
Georgia family claims they don't currently own a computer or have Internet access but did download music in the past.
Carma Walls' music download selections aren't terribly controversial.
Although the songs she's accused of illegally downloading, including Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Soul," Candlebox's "Far Behind," "I Won't Forget You" by Poison, and "Saving All My Love for You" by Whitney Houston, won't make any lists of critics' picks, those tracks aren't the source of any furor.
What has sparked an online fracas in recent days is the decision by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to sue Walls and her family despite their claim that they haven't owned a computer in a year.
The lawsuit was part of a new batch of 235 cases filed by the RIAA last Friday against individuals accused of illegally downloading music through a file-sharing service.
As first reported in the Rockmart Journal in the Walls' hometown of Rome, Georgia, the family says it has not had a computer in its home for a year.
"I don't understand this," James Walls told the paper. "How can they sue us when we don't even have a computer?"
Carma Walls said the family had a computer for about two months more than a year ago, and that she did download some music during that time. She had no idea it was illegal to do so, she told the paper.
"I thought it was like recording songs off the radio like we did when we were kids," she said.
An RIAA spokesperson declined to speak with MP3.com about the Walls case specifically and instead issued a statement the RIAA has released in the past: "Stealing music online is no different going into a music store and shoplifting. Not only does piracy rob recording artists and songwriters of their livelihoods--and threaten the jobs of tens of thousands of less celebrated people in the music industry, from engineers and technicians to warehouse workers and record store clerks--it also undermines the future of music by depriving the industry of the resources it needs to find and develop new talent."
The case revived a longstanding argument about the music industry antipiracy legal strategy of targeting individual downloaders. Since June 2003, the RIAA has filed 3,500 lawsuits in the United States against users of Internet peer-to-peer file-sharing services, such as Kazaa and Grokster.
An online petition to get Congress to do something about the RIAA's legal strategy against individual file sharers, posted by the digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, was deluged today. It has received 86,000 of the 100,000 signatures the group says it needs before sending the petition off to Congress.
A post on TechDirt yesterday said, "Is it any wonder why some people think what the RIAA is doing is tantamount to extortion? Apparently suing nonowners of computers is easier than suing dead people, but aren't all these lawsuits equally frivolous?"
"The industry's anti-piracy efforts have deterred a sizable number of would-be illegal downloaders," the RIAA said in its statement. "Although a significant online problem undoubtedly persists, particularly with hard-core, frequent peer-to-peer users, absent action by the industry, the illegal downloading world would be exponentially worse."
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