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By TREVOR MAXWELL
Blethen Maine Newspapers 11/12/2007

Blethen Maine Newspapers

A Portland lawyer has asked a federal court to rule against the Recording Industry Association of America, and in favor of his client, a college student from Wells.

In an answer to a civil lawsuit, Robert Mittel said the industry has no grounds to demand money from Cara Laude, and he challenged the legal tactics employed by the industry.

The RIAA sued Laude and hundreds of other students this year, in a nationwide effort to crack down on illegal filesharing on campus. Industry giants such as Sony, Warner Bros. and Capitol Records say filesharing over the Internet is hurting business.

About 35 students at Maine colleges have been sued for sharing copyrighted material. Most have settled out of court by paying between $3,000 and $5,000 to the industry. For the students who have not settled, the industry has asked for minimum judgments from the courts of $750 per shared file.

"Suing students is absolutely not our first preference," Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said in an interview last month. "The music industry can't afford to turn a blind eye."

Mittel, of the Portland firm MittelAsen LLC, filed the answer on behalf of Laude in U.S. District Court on Thursday. He said that the industry can claim, at best, that actual damages for copyright infringement amount to 50 cents per song.

"An award of statutory damages some 1,500 or greater times the actual damages of the plaintiffs will constitute a violation of due process," Mittel wrote in the answer.

He also disagrees with the recording industry's claim that the simple act of making a music file available online is distribution under federal law. That same legal argument is under review at other courts across the country.

Mittel placed some of the blame for copyright infringement on the record companies. By continuing to sell entire records, rather than individual tracks, the industry encourages file-sharing, Mittel said. The industry also should be barred from recovering damages, he said, because it produces and markets songs glorifying theft and other criminal conduct.

The industry monitors the use of peer-to-peer programs, such as Ares or LimeWire, and captures data including Internet protocol addresses, time stamps and audio files shared. Then, industry representatives contact college administrators to report the activity, and to ask the school to forward a notification letter to the student whose computer has been flagged. Those letters include offers of settlement. None of the cases against college students have gone to trial in Maine.

If the Laude case were to reach that level, a trial would be scheduled for next summer.

Attempts to reach Mittel and Duckworth were not successful Friday.

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