A legal battle that began nearly three years ago when the Recording Industry Association of America sued the parent of a 7-year-old girl for allegedly downloading pirated music has wound up raising questions about the legality of the industry group’s investigative tactics. Now the case is entering a new chapter that could have implications for the the RIAA’s legal campaign against college students.

The saga began on a summer night in 2005, when Tanya Andersen and her young daughter, Kylee, got an unexpected knock at the door during dinner. They were served notice of a lawsuit alleging that someone used a computer in the house to illegally download songs—including “Shake That Ass Bitch” and “Dope Nose“—under the Internet nickname “gotenkito.”

In court documents, Ms. Andersen denies that anyone in the house ever listened to the songs, much less stole them. She listens to CDs rather than digital music, she says, and is a member of a record company’s CD-of-the-month club. She did a Google search and found a MySpace page of a neighbor who goes by “gotenkito,” and she told the industry group, through her lawyer, that the neighbor was the more likely culprit.

But the RIAA felt that the digital trail led back to the Andersens.

As it has done with lawsuits against college students around the country, the RIAA offered to settle the case if Ms. Andersen paid a few thousand dollars. But Ms. Andersen decided to fight back in federal court and even countersued, arguing that the way the organization hunts for music pirates is illegal. The RIAA employs a company called Media Sentry to search out copyright infringers.

Lory R. Lybeck, a lawyer for Ms. Andersen, said in an interview Tuesday that Media Sentry essentially acts as a private investigator, but does so without the official license that most states require for such activities.

In federal court, Ms. Andersen pressed the RIAA to reveal details of how it came to identify her or her daughter as music pirates. Instead the industry group decided last year to drop its lawsuit against her. This month Ms. Andersen resubmitted her countersuit as its own case in United States District Court in Portland, Ore., asking a the court to stop the industry group from continuing its investigations.

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said that other courts have ruled that the way the industry group handles its investigations is perfectly legal. “What Media Sentry does is, they log on to peer-to-peer networks that are public networks,” she said. “This is all public activity. These are all public networks. The information is public information.”

“We follow the letter of the law in our legal process,” she said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Categories: Campus-Piracy, Legal-Troubles