James Delahunty
15 Sep 2007 19:14
Members of the Santangelo family, sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for alleged copyright infringement by sharing music on P2P networks, have called for AOL, Sharman Networks (which offers the Kazaa P2P software) and Matthew Seckler to be added as third-party defendants to the case. Michelle and Robert Santangelo face an RIAA lawsuit from Elektra Records.
They are demanding $3,966,000 from both AOL and Sharman and $1 from Seckler, who apparently installed the Kazaa software on their computer. This could potentially set a precedence where other P2P defendants point the finger of blame at their ISPs or the providers of file sharing software.
"The Defendants and Third-Party Plaintiffs deny that they or either of them are guilty of Plaintiffs' allegations and affirmatively allege that the injuries sustained by Plaintiffs, if any, were solely caused by reason of the negligence and breaches of the Third-Party Defendants named herein: in the defective design of Sharman Network's program, "Kazaa" which was a dangerous instrumentality in its each and every use as it existed in 2002-2004; the trespassing and reckless installation by Matthew Seckler of such program; the failure to warn by AOL and Sharman; the failure to block the downloading of such files by AOL; the improper blocking of alleged (RIAA) warning messages by AOL and Sharman; and, the secretive file sharing system of and by Kazaa."It is alarming to see AOL being challenged for not filtering / blocking content on the Internet.