Did the RIAA pretend to be grandma?

Back in 2005, Tanya Andersen stood up to the RIAA. They had been threatening her, demanding money in recompense for gangsta rap songs they claimed her daughter - who had been seven years old - had downloaded onto the family £250 Dell computer.

At the start of June, the RIAA quietly withdrew its claims against her - shortly before a deadline set by the court for the labels to offer up evidence that proved their case against her. Now, though, Andersen has issued a demand for recompense from the labels, and in her deposition to the court, has made a number of eye-popping allegations about the RIAA side's behaviour.

These are, of course, the claims of a woman pursuing financial recompense, and so have not been proven in court. However, she suggests that the RIAA threatened to make her ten year old daughter's life a misery if she didn't drop her original counterclaim:

"Defendants' lawyer threatened persecution of Kylee in an effort to force Ms. Andersen to abandon her counterclaims against the defendant record companies," Andersen's complaint claims. "Their demand for face-to-face confrontation with Ms. Andersen's then 10 year-old child in a deposition at the offices of RIAA lawyers were also intended to coerce and threaten her."

Oh, and allegedly, the RIAA phoned up Kylee at school, pretending to be her grandma, to try ratchet up the pressure.

Charming.

Andersen has also expanded her claim to take in MediaSentry - her deposition points out that "evidence" of filesharing the company had provided in Canada had been thrown out as worthless.

The RIAA could find this one worse than embarrassing - it actually threatens to undermine their entire legal battle against filesharing, and could, potentially, open the way for people who'd handed over money in the face of RIAA threats to seek that cash back.

Today, Mitch Bainwol was still bullish, praising a decision by American mayors to sign a piece of paper calling for more training to help local government deal with the risk of copyright theft:

In addition to the commitment to increasing anti-piracy resources and strengthening policies to fight IP theft, the Mayors' resolution also calls for its members to implement tighter internal policies and practices that detect and prevent piracy - such as the use of illegal peer-to-peer applications - on government-owned computers.

We're still not sure what an "illegal peer-to-peer application" would be - presumably there are also criminal presentation packages and outlawed word processing software?