© van Ort

An unusually aggressive lawyer and his Harvard Law School professor have filed a class action lawsuit against the RIAA for over $100 million...

"Lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer," writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson. "The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged '$100+ million' it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long..."

"The two plan to argue that MediaSentry, a firm hired by the RIAA to collect evidence on IP addresses and song sharing, is not licensed as a private investigator," writes DMW's Mark Hefflinger. "They will also dispute the copyrights on the songs in question submitted by the RIAA, as they have not been the 'certified copies' required under federal rules of evidence. Neeson and Camara will also argue that the large sums awarded to the labels as a result of noncommercial copyright infringement are unconstitutional, and most controversially, that file-sharing should be considered a 'fair use' of copyrighted content."

More here from Neowin.net ... and more here from the Duluth News Tribune.