The Recording Industry Association Of America has said it is challenging a recent court decision that forced it to pay the legal fees of a suspected P2P file sharer who successfully proved her innocence.
As previously reported, the trade body sued Deborah Foster after illegal file sharing was linked to her PC. However, the file sharing had been done by Foster's daughter, so she mounted a defence against the litigation, successfully demonstrating she herself had not shared copyright content and, also, winning the legal argument that said she could not be held liable for the actions of her daughter.
The trade body eventually dropped their case against Foster, although they did subsequently win a default judgment against her daughter. Foster then sued for her legal fees claiming the RIAA were wrong to target her in the first place. The courts agreed and ordered the trade organisation to pay the defendant $55,000.
The trade body is now asking the courts to reconsider, both the fees they have been ordered to pay, and the concept that a PC owner can sidestep liability for copyright infringement committed on their machine. The logic behind their bid to avoid paying Foster's legal costs is that the fees they are having to pay are more than any compensation the trade body would have received had they won the action, and that Foster could have settled out of court and, given her circumstances, avoided both a compensation payment and legal costs.
At the time the courts ruled in Foster's favour the RIAA tried to say the ruling was an insignificant isolated case, but the fact they are appealing suggests other legal commentators were right when they observed the Foster case has potentially big implications in the trade body's ongoing anti-P2P litigation campaign. Firstly, the precedent of the Foster ruling means that owners of PCs whose computers have been used for P2P file sharing but who have not actually illegally shared content themselves, people who might have previously quickly settled with the RIAA, may now be motivated to defend themselves. And if precedent also says that the trade body must cover any legal costs when a defendant successfully defends themselves in that way, that makes the whole litigation approach more risky and costly for the record industry.