Family sues P2P service

A family using the class-action process to sue, that is. This is the first report I've seen about parents of file-sharers suing a file-sharing, or peer-to-peer (P2P), service: "Couple plans suit in Web music case" at the Cincinnati Enquirer. Sally and Jim Wilson of Cold Spring, Ohio, were sued in February by the Recording Industry Association because, the RIAA said, their two teenage daughters had downloaded 653 songs illegally. The RIAA added that they "could be liable to pay $750 for each," or $490,000 if they lost the case in court (they settled with the RIAA for $3,000). They are now suing Kazaa, the P2P service their daughters used, basically for profiting from the ignorance of parents of file-sharers, according to the Enquirer. They're using the class-action method so that other parents who have settled with the RIAA will join them in the lawsuit (more than 10,000 people, not necessarily parents, have been sued by the media industry so far). Kazaa is reportedly on the decline among P2P services, but it's still widely used. "In October 2004 alone, approximately 2.4 million users of the FastTrack network, which includes Kazaa and Grokster, traded 1.4 billion files," according to RIAA data cited by the Enquirer. [Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this one out.]