Posted on 12/25/2005 3:39:47 PM PST by Momaw Nadon
WHITE PLAINS, New York - It was Easter Sunday, and Patricia Santangelo was in church with her kids when she says the music recording industry peeked into her computer and decided to take her to court.
Santangelo says she has never downloaded a single song on her computer, but the industry didn't see it that way. The woman from Wappingers Falls, about 80 miles north of New York City, is among the more than 16,000 people who have been sued for allegedly pirating music through file-sharing computer networks.
"I assumed that when I explained to them who I was and that I wasn't a computer downloader, it would just go away," she said in an interview. "I didn't really understand what it all meant. But they just kept insisting on a financial settlement."
The industry is demanding thousands of dollars to settle the case, but Santangelo, unlike the 3,700 defendants who have already settled, says she will stand on principle and fight the lawsuit.
"It's a moral issue," she said. "I can't sign something that says I agree to stop doing something I never did."
If the downloading was done on her computer, Santangelo thinks it may have been the work of a young friend of her children. Santangelo, 43, has been described by a federal judge as "an Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo, and who can barely retrieve her email." Kazaa is the peer-to-peer software program used to share files.
The drain on her resources to fight the case — she's divorced, has five children aged 7 to 19 and works as a property manager for a real estate company — forced her this month to drop her lawyer and begin representing herself.
"There was just no way I could continue on with a lawyer," she said. "I'm out $24,000 and we haven't even gone to trial."
So on Thursday she was all alone at the defense table before federal Magistrate Judge Mark Fox in White Plains, looking a little nervous and replying simply, "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to his questions about scheduling and exchange of evidence.
She did not look like someone who would have downloaded songs like Incubus' "Nowhere Fast," Godsmack's "Whatever" and Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life," all of which were allegedly found on her computer.
Her former lawyer, Ray Beckerman, says Santangelo doesn't really need him.
"I'm sure she's going to win," he said. "I don't see how they could win. They have no case. They have no evidence she ever did anything. They don't know how the files appeared on her computer or who put them there."
Jenni Engebretsen, spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, the coalition of music companies that is pressing the lawsuits, would not comment specifically on Santangelo's case.
"Our goal with all these anti-piracy efforts is to protect the ability of the recording industry to invest in new bands and new music and give legal online services a chance to flourish," she said. "The illegal downloading of music is just as wrong as shoplifting from a local record store."
The David-and-Goliath nature of the case has attracted considerable attention in the Internet community. To those who defend the right to such "peer-to-peer" networks and criticize the RIAA's tactics, Santangelo is a hero.
Jon Newton, founder of an Internet site critical of the record companies, said by e-mail that with all the settlements, "The impression created is all these people have been successfully prosecuted for some as-yet undefined 'crime'. And yet not one of them has so far appeared in a court or before a judge. ... She's doing it alone. She's a courageous woman to be taking on the multibillion-dollar music industry."
Santangelo said her biggest issue is with Kazaa for allowing children to download music without parental permission. "I should have gotten at least an e-mail or something notifying me," she said. Telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment from the Australia-based owner of Kazaa, Sharman Networks Ltd., were not returned.
Because some cases are settled just before a trial and because it would be months before Santangelo's got that far, it's impossible to predict whether she might be the first to go to trial over music downloading.
But she vows that she's in the fight to stay.
"People say to me, `You're crazy. Why don't you just settle?' I could probably get out of the whole thing if I paid maybe $3,500 and signed their little document. But I won't do that."
Her travail started when the record companies used an investigator to go online and search for copyrighted recordings being made available by individuals. The investigator allegedly found hundreds on her computer on April 11, 2004. Months later, there was a phone call from the industry's "settlement center," demanding about $7,500 "to keep me from being named in a lawsuit," Santangelo said.
Santangelo and Beckerman were confident they would win a motion to dismiss the case, but Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the record companies had enough of a case to go forward. She said the issue was whether "an Internet-illiterate parent" could be held liable for her children's downloads.
Santangelo says she's learned a lot about computers in the past year.
"I read some of these blogs and they say, `Why didn't this woman have a firewall?' she said. "Well, I have a firewall now. I have a ton of security now."
The reason I made the comment is because, you CAN NOT distribute, or make a copy, legally of copywritten material without the consent of the author or owner of that material. The lack of eforcement of a law does not make it any less illegal.
Look up the copywrite law!
It is copyRIGHT law, not copywrite.
And, current copyright law is not what the founders intended.
I am talking about ethics, not the law. It is not ethically stealing to be given a copy of a file that is not the same format or quality of the original copyrighted item.
I am perfectly aware of what is possible and it is a parents responsibility to know what is going on in their own home and if they DO NOT know, then they should not own a pc. It comes with being a responsible adult/parent. You have your views and I have mine. Please give me the respect I deserve in voicing my opinion.
It is a parents responsibility to know what is going on in their own home and if they DO NOT know, then they should not own a pc. It comes with being a responsible adult/parent. You have your views and I have mine. Please give me the respect I deserve in voicing my opinion.
now... since you have your position... let's say that is how the law works. great. next, i send you an email, you read it but are unaware that I have just installed a program on your system. That software will now download/distribute music, movies, and porn.
next, the RIAA finds out, puts a $30,000 fine on you, and then drops a dime to the feds for the kiddie porn they also found on your machine.
oh yea.. i guess you'd have to take the responsibility since it was on your machine. You can cry about not having any knowledge or warning of the software, but you do admit its your machine and you are the parent in the house.
I do respect your rights to open your pie hole and babble at length, that does not mean I have to respect the content.
If you take a look at post 184 in this thread you may see why Sten posted a response to you. You may not have intended to put that post up, but if you say to Sten that yr response was not to him or her, well, it doesn't exactly make sense.
If you're accusing me of being somehow disrespectful, then I'm puzzled. It's a particularly bewildering accusation considering the tone of yr post where you speak of people living under rocks and such. Regardless of the issue of parental responsibility, I maintain that having heard of Napster, and having heard of Kazaa are two completely different things. If I wanted to play devil's advocate I could, in spite of what you say about 'you have yr view & I have mine,' make something of a case that Gnutella clients were popularizing p2p & illegal file-sharing among hardcore computer users pretty much at the same time that Napster was beginning to gain notoriety & being named in the media. Kazaa has never gotten the attention that Napster and, later, Grokster have, in terms of name recognition. That's MY view. My view also says that there are responsible parents out there who don't know the difference between how Napster worked and how Kazaa works, and figure that if there's no Napster & no Grokster visible on their machine, then there's nothing funny going on.
The defendant's contention, as I understood it, was that her children actually were not the responsible parties, that it was done by a friend of one of the children. That may be a questionable claim. But it's hardly impossible. I have a couple of nephews that are not wise to the ways of file-sharing at all. Nor are their parents particularly computer literate. If a friend of these boys installed a p2p program on their computer, and if there were legally ripped mp3 files on that machine that were moved or copied to a shared folder, then the RIAA could easily download files from that machine. It's not so farfetched as you may think.
If the issue for you is solely a matter of parental responsibility, I would suggest you keep in mind that the reason this case has been brought is because of copyright infringement. That's not a matter of 'you have yr view & I have mine'. That's a matter of fact. And, the rudeness of others aside, there is more to this than what you apparently choose to view it as.
If you're going to suggest that I've been disrespectful to you I would ask that you provide an example.
My original post #166 was NOT to him if you care to read. He posted to me first in reply to my 166 post. As far as your post goes, as I said you are entitled to your views and I am mine and I WILL NOT change my mind. MY posts were based on the mothers comments herself below. Not yours or stens. Got it now?
******Santangelo thinks it may have been the work of a young friend of her children. Santangelo, 43, has been described by a federal judge as "an Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo, and who can barely retrieve her email." Kazaa is the peer-to-peer software program used to share files.
Santangelo said her biggest issue is with Kazaa for allowing children to download music without parental permission. "I should have gotten at least an e-mail or something notifying me," she said
Santangelo and Beckerman were confident they would win a motion to dismiss the case, but Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the record companies had enough of a case to go forward. She said the issue was whether "an Internet-illiterate parent" could be held liable for her children's downloads
----These are the statements I was commenting on. It proves there was no supervision and her children could not be trusted which is why I blame her for NOT doing her job as a parent.
"Your Honor, thank you; now I respectfully request you to rebuke this lying idiot who doesn't deserve to be called an officer."
I can get it for free off the radio... now rage on that one a while.
For someone who complains about others not being respectful you sure are testy. I'm still looking for that example of where I was disrespectful to you.
If I care to read post 167, it looks like one poster responded to another's post. Is that not how a message board functions? Was the person who submitted post #1 in this thread the only one allowed to respond to you? If you care to read post 184, it is in response to this poster, and there you are saying yr post is not in response to them...I can't believe I'm spending time on this.
Here's a link to a transcript of a pretrial discussion that took place in the courtroom some months back. If you care to read, that is. Perhaps you'll see that I have no interest in changing yr mind. If yr sole angle on this case is on the basis of parental supervision, that is yr privilege & right. I've been paying attention to the issue of illegal file-sharing on p2p networks for some time, so I'm just as focused on the issue of copyright infringement. But I don't exclude one for the sake of the other. If it has to be that black-and-white for you, so be it.
You'll want to pay attention to some of the discussion that starts getting going about halfway down this page, which is not very long. What nobody seems to want to take into consideration is that many speak of illegalities and what 'is' without benefit of any precedents arising from an actual case on this issue. If you believe that a jury will not take into consideration that the woman is raising five children on her own, that is yr right. Regardless of what sort of parent you may be, and regardless of my view on how responsible a parent should be, my feeling is that a jury may well be comprised of individuals who are either not as responsible as we would agree a parent should be, or may relate to difficulties that people they know encounter in their attempts to enforce parental responsibility. You may well be correct that there was a laxness in that responsibility. But you are not trying this case. My interest is based more on what will actually happen with a jury than judgmental speculation based on yr values, or mine. One person's values may indeed be superior, but that doesn't enter into this case. That's MY view.
http://www.geocities.com/codewarrior_wins/transcript050506.txt
The reality here is, it does not matter what this woman says or does not say, or has or does not have.
Having copyrighted material is not a violation of anyone's copyright. Acquiring it and using it without paying for it is a violation, but she is not obligated to show proof that she paid for it. The burden is on the plaintiff to persaude a court or jury that a preponderance of evidence says she did aquire it and use it without paying for it.
So to some extent they are obligated to persuade the court and jury of a string of negatives (proving a negative is logically impossible, and a sticky jury won't accept any of this). The string is all the possibilities. They must show that some guest in her house did NOT do it. They must show that she listened to the songs, and to do that they must have an eye(ear)witness and date and time of the occurrence. Meaning, they must show that she did NOT merely have it and never listened to it.
Frankly, this is abuse of process. They are using the costs and effort of litigation to extort money. Counter suits will follow. Good lawyers right now are orchestrating a class action.
Thanks for sharing your opinion with the thread. Have a great day.
I’m not about to say anything like that in any traffic court around here.
If they did download it from her computer, then their case that she made copyrighted files available for others to download on Kazaa or whatever network is valid, sorry.
The variables that may well contribute towards her potential exoneration are not necessarily based on the letter of the law. But if the letter of the law is all that matters here, it doesn't matter if a guest or children's playmate did this. If the files were downloaded from her computer, their claim holds water.
If someone broke into her house while she was not there & installed Kazaa & the result was that 1 file ended up in a shared folder, then they have a case.
Whether or not a jury would go by the letter of the law in such a case, that's a different story. But the scenario could exist. What I find more interesting, if not disturbing, is the issue of the process the RIAA's investigators use to identify computers offering downloads. How easy is it for an IP address to be spoofed? That's most likely what happened to the elderly woman I mentioned, Sarah Seabury Ward. I hate to be in the posiiton of pointing to the rare exception to make a point, but how many more have there been like her that we haven't heard about?
Think for a moment about the idea of an elderly woman receiving one of these phone calls from the RIAA demanding that she contact their settlement center. Because she had all these files on her machine. I think that case was heavy on gangsta rap. But then the inconvenient facts came to light. Few remember it now, though. To some people, the RIAA tactics are all fine & well. To others who care at all about the issue, it's a one-way ticket to turning public opinion against you even more. The XCP fiasco wasn't enough, was it.
I guess not.
That pc owners have to be vigilant about their computers--which possess capabilities that many do not understand, or are perhaps even aware of, is the best potential result from this case. Regardless of the outcome. Even if the defendant prevails, people will take note that they have to be more careful.
I have an opinion that's based on a morality issue. Certainly you won't change that opinion, and I'm sure I won't change your opinions. You guys have a great day.
For free... off the radio... that's LEGAL, buster... now cry in your beer.
Thanks.
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