Deltanine

Six record labels including Sony, BMG and Virgin have withdrawn a $300m lawsuit against a 66-year old woman sculptor who, it turns out, has never used file sharing software.

The RIAA said Sarah Ward was sharing 2,000 songs through the KaZaA P2P network exposing her, at $150,000 per offense, to $300,000,000 in penalties. But not only had she never downloaded a song, but as a a Macintosh user, she couldn't even run the KaZaA software, which only runs on Windows.

With characteristic bad grace, attorneys for the RIAA members reserved the right to harass the woman in future:

"Please note, however, that we will continue our review of the issues you raised and we reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant," wrote Colin Zick, attorney for the record labels, the Boston Globe reports.

Having attacked naval cadets, students, young children and now innocent senior citizens, the music business appears not to fear the consequences of its litigation. However, it can't afford too many more cases of mistaken identity.