From The Journal News (Westchester County, NY): File-share plaintiff plans own defense
The soccer mom who has become the face of the recording industry’s lawsuits against alleged online music pirates has decided to act as her own lawyer after racking up more than $20,000 in legal fees in her ongoing fight with several record companies.
Patricia Santangelo, the 42-year-old former Yorktown resident who now lives in Wappingers Falls, was sued in February by record companies that accused her of illegally trading copyrighted songs online. The recording industry has filed more than 16,000 lawsuits against individual Internet users since launching the federal lawsuit campaign in September 2003.
Record companies charge that the trading of copyrighted songs online through such computer programs as Kazaa and Grokster is a threat to the industry’s survival. Critics have decried the lawsuit campaign as a heavy-handed bullying effort by deep-pocketed multinational corporations against ordinary people.
Santangelo had hired a New York City law firm to defend her in the case in U.S. District Court in White Plains. Santangelo said she has never traded songs online and should not be held accountable if anyone else used her computer to do so. The divorced mother of five children, ranging in age from 7 to 19, works as a property manager for a real estate company.
She said she was in church on the Easter Sunday morning in 2004 when the lawsuit charges that songs were illegally traded through her Internet account. She could have settled the lawsuit for about $7,500 several months ago but said that she decided against that because “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She recently lost a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. After that ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, Santangelo said, she looked at her mounting legal bills, now above $22,000, and was left with two options: settle the case or continue on as her own attorney.
“I thought about settling for a split second,” she said. “But I can’t. I can’t let it go. I have to see this through.”
More than 3,000 of the lawsuits have been settled with individual defendants agreeing to pay about $5,000 each to close the cases.
The prohibitive cost of fighting the suits makes settling an attractive option for most people, leaving the legality of the lawsuits unchallenged, said Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group that opposes the lawsuits.
“The recording industry has basically been able to run this operation like a shakedown,” he said.
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, the umbrella group that represents the record companies, said the companies are within their rights to protect their business.
“We’re working to help protect the future of music, including the ability of record labels to invest in the bands of tomorrow,” Jonathan Lamy said in an e-mail. “Downloading songs without permission is just as illegal as shoplifting, and it is every bit as wrong.”
Santangelo and the record companies are due back in court Dec. 22. That will be her first taste of lawyering. She said she was nervous about being her own attorney while untrained in the law.
“I think about it often. It’s a little scary,” Santangelo said. “But I can’t give in, no.”
Follow
