"This is going to be an uphill climb for the recording industry," he says. "They have to show that the parent contributed to the infringement or directly benefited. If the kid is upstairs on the computer and the parents didn't know what he or she was doing, that is going to be very hard to prove."

....Swire, who believes it's a case easily won, says he hopes some brave parent takes the heat. By going after the kid instead of the parent in court, "the RIAA risks seeming like even more of a heavy."

New York City college student Lorraine Sullivan, 28, says the RIAA was wrong to target her. She has called about settling and will accept the $3,500 offer. But she wishes she could afford to take them on.

"I'm terrified of bankruptcy," she writes on her suedbytheriaa.com Web site. "How could I, an already in debt college student, possibly go up against a multibillion-dollar international industry and survive?" [USA Today] Lorraine is looking for donations, by the way.

And finally, after a period of regrouping in response to the RIAA's legal shock and awe campaign, contrary voices are becoming very defiant:

you can't stop mp3s now, it's too late.

Is it stealing? You could line up all 261 of the defendants and shoot them in the back of the head on national television and it wouldn't work. We're going to keep at it because you've made it so much cooler by making it on the edge of illegal. This is an easy way for simple, unadventurous people to feel like they're criminals too and are able to affect the profit margins of invincible corporations. You took consumers for granted and now they're taking you for granted. [Purdue Exponent]

UPDATE
Report on the Verizon appeal:

The three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia tossed tough questions at lawyers for all sides. Judges plainly wrestled with esoteric provisions of the disputed 1998 law that permits music companies and others to force Internet providers to turn over the names of suspected pirates.

....But if the appeals court was leaning in one direction by the end of Tuesday's hearing, it was indecipherable. One judge, John Roberts, alternately suggested that a "logical extension" of the 1998 law wouldn't permit such subpoenas in these music lawsuits; then he accused Verizon of profiting from the online piracy of its subscribers.

"You make a lot of money off piracy," Roberts told Verizon lawyer Andrew McBride. People who download large collections of music traditionally favor high-speed Internet connections like those offered by Verizon's Internet subsidiary.

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