Patricia Santangelo is a New York mom who got threatened with a lawsuit by the music industry unless she paid them $7500. The RIAA alleged that she'd been using P2P software to trade copyrighted music — but she hadn't. She'd never used P2P software and neither had any of her family. She is the first of 14,000 people who've received these threats to stand up to them and defend herself, rather than settle. Her extraordinary attorney believes that he'll recoup the costs of her defense from the RIAA, and has pledged to hire more lawyers, as many as it takes to defend everyone whom the RIAA attempts to shake down for alleged file-sharing. P2Pnet has an inspiring interview with her:
I had no idea what Kazaa was or what it was used for. I think of software as an actual disk that you hold in your hand so I'm not sure about that or how it was installed. The screen-name that was used for the Kazaa account did not belong to any of my children is what I said….I had no idea what either a p2p or an mp3 was.
(Thanks, Jason!)
