RIAA Still Doing It For (And To) The Kids

Remember the recipients of those RIAA file-sharing lawsuits from a few years back? There was the grandmother who was already dead, the family that didn’t even own a computer, and the grandmother who was alive but who had never downloaded (we also heard that the RIAA went after the late Snowball I, but we couldn’t confirm it). Anyway, a 16-year-old boy who’s being sued by the organization fired back yesterday in a White Hills, NY court:

Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, responded at length Tuesday, raising 32 defenses, demanding a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies that accuses them of damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees.

His defenses to the industry’s lawsuit include that he never sent copyrighted music to others, that the recording companies promoted file sharing before turning against it, that average computer users were never warned that it was illegal, that the statute of limitations has passed, and that all the music claimed to have been downloaded was actually owned by his sister on store-bought CDs.

Robert Santangelo also claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, “have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States”…the papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

Santangelo is no stranger to the courts: His mother and his sister have both been sued by the organization, and while the case against the elder Mrs. Santangelo was dropped, she’s now hoping that the RIAA won’t take her baby away. We’re intrigued to see how this all turns out, especially the “extortionate threats” argument, as it may finally make for an online-piracy that doesn’t make us want to hit ourselves with a shoehorn out of sheer boredom.

NY boy sued by music companies responds [AP via Business Week]