According to a new article from Wired, legal experts are saying that many of the file sharing lawsuits filed by the RIAA are being waged against innocent victims. The RIAA has sued more than 14,000 people since beginning its litigation campaign in September 2003. So far, more than 3,300 parties have settled out of court, which the RIAA says proves that the majority of those summoned are guilty. However, attorneys representing some of these people say their clients are being bullied into settling as the cheapest way to get out of trouble, and that they're being harassed to pay thousands of dollars for claims that they know nothing about.

Ray Beckerman, a New York-based attorney with Beldock Levine & Hoffman, told Wired that he thinks thousands of people are being wrongly accused of copyright infringement. "My impression is that the majority of those sued are innocent," he said. "Prior to retaining lawyers, when (defendants) talk to the settlement support center, they are threatened with criminal prosecution, ruin of their credit, publication of their names."

Beckerman is defending Patricia Santangelo, a single mother of five children, who launched one of the first major challenges against the RIAA. Back in May, she testified that she no longer owned the computer with the IP address allegedly used for illegal uploads and that the screen name corresponding to the Kazaa program that was used belonged to a friend of one of her children. Wired notes that matching names to IP addresses can be a difficult and error-prone process. Many things can go wrong when determining who is actually doing the downloading and uploading, especially when attempting to identify users' names, IP addresses and actual PCs, let alone the PC user at the time.

Other parents have also proclaimed their innocence in similar cases, but an RIAA spokesperson said in a statement that the association had "complete confidence in the litigations we have filed and in the judicial process to resolve the issues raised in those cases."