Recording Industry Drops Suit Against Grandmother
Thu September 25, 2003 05:34 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The recording industry has withdrawn a copyright infringement lawsuit against a 65-year-old grandmother who said she was wrongly accused of downloading and using song-sharing network.

Sarah Seabury Ward was one of 261 people sued this month by the recording industry for allegedly sharing copyrighted music using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems.

The Sarah Ward case demonstrates the reckless, frightening nature of the recording industry's campaign against ordinary Americans, said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legal director Cindy Cohn, who has worked with Ward's family.

Cohn said the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents big labels like AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music and Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, charged Ward with sharing songs using the KaZaA file-sharing software, even though she owns only a Macintosh computer which cannot run KaZaA.

Cohn said the RIAA sued Ward solely on the basis of screen shots from the KaZaA network and information obtained from a subpoena issued to Comcast, Ward's Internet service provider.

In a Sept. 19 letter to Ward's defense attorney, Jeffrey Beeler, the RIAA said it decided to dismiss the lawsuit as a gesture of good faith.

We are being as careful as we can and we have chosen to give her (Ward) the benefit of the doubt. We will continue to look into this to determine the facts, the spokeswoman said.

The letter said the RIAA reserved the right to refile the complaint against Ward if and when circumstances warrant.
Reuters