A litigation target of the Recording Industry Association of America has been awarded attorney's fees after the music business falsely sued an Oregon woman for copyright infringement.

It is the second time a federal judge has awarded defense expenses to an RIAA target who was falsely accused.

In the Oregon case, U.S. District Judge James Redden ruled Tuesday that 42-year-old Tanya Andersen should be compensated for the costs of her legal defense. The court did not specify how much to award Andersen, but her lawyers have suggested it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The RIAA and Andersen's lawyers must now haggle over compensation, which Redden must approve.

The industry accused her of distributing rap music on the Kazaa file-sharing network, but dropped the 2005 case after concluding the allegations could not be proved. Although the RIAA dismissed the case, it fought paying legal fees, decrying Andersen as a music thief along the way.

"It would be an extraordinary coincidence indeed if this defendant had nothing to do with infringement at issue in this matter," RIAA attorney William Patton wrote in a court brief opposing legal costs.

The Copyright Act, under which the RIAA has sued thousands of individuals, allows judges to "award a reasonable attorney's fee to the prevailing party." Judge Redden, in his decision, declared Andersen the "prevailing party."

The only other time fees were awarded to an RIAA defendant was last year, when an Oklahoma federal judge ordered the RIAA to pay $68,685 to two Oklahoma women whose joint case the RIAA brought against them was dismissed for lack of evidence.

But fees to the prevailing party are not automatic, as was illustrated last week when a federal appeals court ruled a Texas man falsely sued for infringement should not be compensated for defending himself. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the RIAA's case against Cliff Thomas was not "frivolous or objectively unreasonable."

The court noted that RIAA investigators accurately detected "substantial copyright infringement" on Thompson's IP address. As it turned out, Thomas said it was his daughter who did the deed, and the RIAA sued her instead and won a default judgement.

Andersen, in response to being sued, has filed a lawsuit against the RIAA seeking class-action status in Oregon federal court. The case, which is pending, seeks to represent RIAA defendants who say they have been falsely sued.

The RIAA has sued more than 20,000for copyright infringement. Most have settled out of court.

Only one case has gone to trial, and the defendant lost when a jury ordered her to pay $222,000 for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa.

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