Lawyer for woman sued by RIAA asks for sanctions, gets sanctioned himself
Last year, an attorney representing a woman sued by the Recording Industry Association of America claimed his client is innocent and asked a federal judge to levy sanctions against the association's lawyers.
Context & Ripple Effects
This case lands mid-arc for the Recording Industry Association of America's litigation campaign: back in November 2006, Techdirt reported that a court had agreed to examine the constitutionality of RIAA's file-sharing fines, putting the association's sue-the-fan strategy under procedural pressure rather than letting it run on autopilot.
In this matter, the defendant's attorney took the aggressive route — asserting his client's innocence and formally asking a federal judge to sanction the RIAA's own lawyers. Per the confirmed record, the gambit inverted: the judge sanctioned the woman's attorney instead, leaving the RIAA's counsel unpenalized and the defense holding a self-inflicted wound.
First-order effects
- The woman's attorney now carries a sanction of his own on the record, while the RIAA's lawyers escape the penalty they were targeted with — a direct reversal of the motion he filed.
Second-order effects
- Other defendants in the RIAA's lawsuit wave face a recalculated risk curve: filing sanctions motions against the association's attorneys can boomerang onto the filer, raising the cost of confrontational defenses.
Third-order effects
- If sanction attempts keep failing while separate scrutiny of the fines' constitutionality proceeds, the campaign's contested ground shifts from who infringed toward whether the RIAA's litigation machinery itself is procedurally sound — with defendants split between aggressive counterattack and conventional defense.
The trend: The RIAA's mass litigation campaign is entering a phase where courtroom procedure — sanctions motions, constitutional challenges to its fines — has become as much of a battleground as infringement itself.