How Oregon is Fighting RIAA - State attorney general questions RIAA's tactics
Oregon s State Attorney General has been actively involved in fighting the tactics of RIAA in its litigation against students at the University of Oregon. The belief is that the RIAA s tactics for gathering evidence are questionable at best.
Context & Ripple Effects
The RIAA's campus litigation campaign has spent 2007 running into resistance at the discovery stage: a [[a:1178695|Boston University student fought the label group's attempt to unmask the person behind an IP address]] in June, and by August a University of Tennessee student argued its subpoenas violate federal privacy law. Those were lone defendants with hired lawyers; what changed this week is that Oregon's attorney general has taken up the same fight on behalf of University of Oregon students, formally questioning how the RIAA gathers its evidence.
The timing matters because the RIAA enters this fight emboldened — its October jury win, a $222,000 judgment against Jammie Thomas, showed the litigation strategy can pay off in court. An intervening state AG attacks the strategy at its foundation: if the IP-to-identity evidence chain is unreliable, every downstream verdict rests on contested ground.
First-order effects
- University of Oregon students targeted in the RIAA's lawsuits gain a state-level advocate challenging the evidence-gathering methods behind their cases, not just the claims themselves.
- The RIAA now faces scrutiny of its subpoena-and-IP-discovery playbook from a state attorney general rather than individual defendants, raising the legal cost of every campus case it files in Oregon.
Second-order effects
- Other universities and state officials watching the Oregon intervention have a template for pushing back collectively, converting isolated student defenses into institutional opposition to the RIAA's discovery tactics.
- After the Jammie Thomas verdict demonstrated that juries will deliver six-figure judgments, challenges to the underlying evidence become the most efficient way for defendants and their allies to undermine the campaign's economics without winning courtroom verdicts of their own.
Third-order effects
- If state attorneys general make a habit of auditing the RIAA's evidence-gathering, the mass-litigation model built on unmasking users from IP addresses comes under judicial and regulatory pressure that no single defendant could generate — potentially forcing a shift toward negotiated campus arrangements or legislative channels.
- The pattern points toward copyright enforcement disputes being litigated as much over process (how infringers are identified) as over the infringement itself, raising the evidentiary bar for all large-scale P2P lawsuits.
The trend: Opposition to the RIAA's file-sharing litigation is scaling up from individual defendants and their lawyers to institutions — universities and state attorneys general — attacking the evidence-gathering methods the whole campaign depends on.