The Recording Industry Association Of America has failed to avoid paying the legal fees of one of the mothers it sued over allegations of illegal file sharing. As much previously reported, the RIAA sued Deborah Foster when it identified illegal file sharing activity was taking place on her PC. However, Foster argued, quite convincingly, that, while such activity may have been going on via her PC, it wasn't her doing the sharing.
Given that defence, the RIAA decided to drop its case against Foster last year, rather than push on with the as yet unproven argument of 'secondary liability' (where PC owners are liable for any copyright violation committed by others on their computer), and instead launched a lawsuit against her daughter who had been doing the actual filesharing - a case they won by default.
After dropping their litigation, Foster sued the RIAA for compensation to cover her legal costs, arguing the trade body should never have sued her in the first place. The courts agreed and ordered the RIAA to pay Foster's legal fees. The RIAA appealed, arguing that their case against Foster was, in fact, not flawed (because of the secondary liability thing) and that they could have won had they proceeded with the lawsuit. But ruling on that appeal, the courts said this week: "The plaintiffs assert that had the case continued, they would have proved their secondary liability claims. That may be so. The plaintiffs, however, chose not to pursue the claim. They moved, voluntarily, to dismiss their claims after the defendant had already made a substantial investment toward defending against those claims".
The RIAA do their best to play down judgments like this, but those who oppose the trade body's litigious approach to P2P say they are important because they increase the financial risk the record industry takes when it sues suspected file sharers - because it is always possible that whoever is registered as owning an IP address where file sharing is taking place is not themselves participating in, or even aware of, said copyright violation. Of course the RIAA will argue that if it can successfully demonstrate the principle of 'secondary liability' then this isn't really a risk at all - but that's a principle as yet unproven and there is some dispute as to whether current copyright law would allow it to exist.