We've all heard the stories about people being mistakenly accused for illegal file sharing by the Recording Industry Ass. of America. Now one of them is fighting back. Tanya Andersen was accused by the RIAA of downloading gangsta rap from her computer at 4 in the morning. The charges proved to be baseless, but Andersen is not happy with the "my bad" she got from the RIAA. She's suing them for violating the state RICO statute.

Tanya Andersen, a 41-year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation. She is claiming hurt feelings and "outrage", and deceptive business practices.

According to court documents here, Anderson said the record industry has been abusing the law courts and waged a public relations and public threat campaign targeting file sharing.

She claims that the RIAA hired an outfit called MediaSentry to invade private home computers and collect personal information. Based on private information allegedly extracted from these personal home computers, the record companies have reportedly filed lawsuits against more than 13,500 anonymous "John Does".

She claims the record companies provide the personal information to Settlement Support Center, which engages in outlawed and deceptive debt collection and other illegal conduct to extract money from the people allegedly identified from the secret lawsuits.

After the alleged hacking, came the alleged intimidation.

When Andersen contacted Settlement Support Center, she was advised that her personal home computer had been secretly entered by the record companies' agents, MediaSentry.

Apparently she had been up at 4:24am downloading "gangster rap" music under the login name "[email protected]." Andersen does not like "gangster rap", does not recognise the name "gotenkito", is not awake at 4:24 a.m. and has never downloaded music.

The Settlement Support Center threatened that if Andersen did not immediately pay them, the record companies would bring an expensive and disruptive federal lawsuit using her name and they would get a judgment for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At one point, Congress had planned to make the RIAA and their goons immune from prosecution, meaning they could break into your computer, peek at what you're doing, disable it if they wanted to, and you couldn't do anything about it.