For those of you who haven’t yet year about Patricia Santangelo, the single mother of five who is fighting back against the RIAA - I suggest you check out this article.

Now that we’re all familiar with that event, let’s move on to an interesting post made on Boing Boing today. According to Patricia’s lawyers, this might signal an end to lawsuits that (so far) have resulted in zero convitions and thousands of out of court settlements. Her lawyer said that because he is confident that he will win and recoup her fee from the RIAA, his firm should be able to represent a lot more people. Then the RIAA should realize that they can’t just pressure people into settlements - at least that’s the idea.

For far more in depth coverage than I could offer, I point you to three places:
Boing Boing
P2PNet
Recording Industry vs The People

Personally I’m really interested to see how this is going to turn out. I can’t deny that downloading music from anywhere not sponsored by record label or band is definetely of questionable legality. However, I don’t think it’s this big, evil thing that the RIAA would like to make it out to be. Your thoughts?