RIAA Sued for the Doing Same Thing the Mafia Does

See, kids, when you hire agencies to trawl the internet and divine file sharing information from the ether, you tend to make mistakes about the people you take to court. How do sane, rational organizations resolve something like that (assuming sane, rational organizations have teams of computer people hacking your megabits)? A written apology, and maybe some cash to throw the accused off the lawsuit scent. How does the RIAA handle it? They threaten to take you to court, where you'll be subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, not to mention going to jail for a very, very long time. There's only one problem: that's considered extortion.

That's right, Tanya Andersen, a 41-year-old disabled woman accused of downloading gangsta rap at 4:30 in the morning, has countersued the RIAA for RICO, among other heinous acts of privacy invasion and corporate bullying. Guess what, folks? They went after the Gottis for that. With any luck, the case will hold up, and an industry who's survived on their own mass to instill fear in good people will finally be taken down a peg. Sure would be a shame if they forgot to purchase their legal protection money.