WHITE PLAINS, New York -- It was Easter Sunday, and Patricia Santangelo was in church with her kids when she says the music recording industry peeked into her computer and decided to take her to court.
Santangelo says she has never downloaded a single song on her computer, but the industry didn't see it that way. The woman from Wappingers Falls, about 80 miles north of New York City, is among the more than 16,000 people who have been sued for allegedly pirating music through file-sharing computer networks.
"I assumed that when I explained to them who I was and that I wasn't a computer downloader, it would just go away," she said in an interview. "I didn't really understand what it all meant. But they just kept insisting on a financial settlement."
The industry is demanding thousands of dollars to settle the case, but Santangelo, unlike the 3,700 defendants who have already settled, says she will stand on principle and fight the lawsuit.
"It's a moral issue," she said. "I can't sign something that says I agree to stop doing something I never did."
If the downloading was done on her computer, Santangelo thinks it may have been the work of a young friend of her children. Santangelo, 43, has been described by a federal judge as "an internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo, and who can barely retrieve her e-mail." Kazaa is the peer-to-peer software program used to share files.
The drain on her resources to fight the case -- she's divorced, has five children aged 7 to 19 and works as a property manager for a real estate company -- forced her this month to drop her lawyer and begin representing herself.
"There was just no way I could continue on with a lawyer," she said. "I'm out $24,000 and we haven't even gone to trial."...
