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RIAA Files Pack of Lies in Federal Courtby George Ziemann -- July 5, 2009 The RIAA has filed papers in Anderson v Atlantic claiming they have only sued 18,000 people. This is a lie (to a Federal court) which can easily be disproven by the RIAA's own press releases.
I started with a quick Google search. The pattern developed pretty quickly and I hadn't even dug through my own writing yet. Then I stumbled upon RIAA Watch, a blog which links to each and every RIAA press release from September 2003 to February 2006 concerning how many people they had sued. He forgot the first four from spring of 2003, but I'm not going to change his numbers. The site seems to have been abandoned since June 2006. Please note that each and every link marked "RIAA PR" goes to a dead page. We will be using these addresses later to search through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
I looked up a couple of the press releases at the WayBack Machine. They were accurate. For further verification, well, that's what law students are for. Also, the numbers from FindLaw and Steve Knopper of Rolling Stone magazine reflect totals in the range of the press releases. They were not added into the final total of 17,587 lawsuits. At the end of February, 2006. Fast forward ahead to July, 2009. In a filing by the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim in Anderson v Atlantic,
Slight deviations. I also find the choice of words interesting. These are the "individuals contacted," not the individuals sued, threatened, etc. As a result, it should be a much larger number, which should include all of the "pre-litigation notices" it started sending out in 2006. Either that, or the RIAA is expecting us to believe they've only sued 413 lawsuits since Feb. 2006.
Again, they contacted "over 18,000 people." There may be "slight deviations" from the actual numbers, which was only 413 lawsuits away from the 18,000 mark three and a half years ago -- according to the totals from the RIAA press releases. I guess that if you've sued 35,000 people, it would still be technically correct to say you sued more than 18,000.
Okay, we've established that the 18,000 figure does, in fact, include the cases for which no actual lawsuit was filed. In July 2005, more than 2400 people had already settled. More than half of the 4000 cases that settled did so after the introduction of the "pre-litigation letter," which emerged in 2006.
Notice how items 8 and 9 tries to restate the number of people who settled or, at the very least, confuse the issue. Total cases -- 18,000 I wonder which group the dead people were in. Most of them seem to have had a lawsuit filed. So where were we...? Oh yeah, 2006.
One thing is clear -- Either the RIAA has been lying to us, consistently, for more than 6 years, feeding us inflated numbers of their inquisition against music fans OR they're lying about it now. In a federal court.
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