A disabled Beaverton woman claiming she was unfairly targeted and pursued by the Recording Industry Association of America and asked to pay thousands of dollars in compensation for illegal downloads she never even made is counter-suing this week. RIAA: Orwell would be proud.

The woman’s suit, brought by Washington law firm Lybeck & Murphy, offers insight into the seeming (and alleged!) relentlessness of America’s recording industry in its efforts to threaten and intimidate the public to maintain its distribution monopoly.

Lawsuits can be complex, obscure, but this one’s bloody interesting, I think—especially for anybody with an interest in the music industry. I’ve written about it after the jump to save your eyes, but I guarantee if you can last to the second paragraph, you’ll be reading to the end.

Tanya Andersen alleges she was sitting down to dinner with her eight-year-old daughter on August 26, 2005, when a legal process server knocked at her door to serve a federal lawsuit, falsely claiming she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a Washington-headquartered trade group claiming to represent the interests of the country's biggest record companies—as penalty for illegally downloading music.

Andersen initially received a letter from an LA-based law firm falsely claiming she had illegally downloaded music. When she contacted the lawyer's agent, she was allegedly told that unless she immediately paid $4,000-$5,000, the RIAA would ruin her financially. She said she had never downloaded music and even offered to let someone inspect her computer. Instead, the RIAA sued her on June 24, 2005, alleging that its cyber-investigation body, MediaSentry, had caught her sharing files online at 4:20am on May 20, 2004, and identified her as "gotenkito@kazaa."

After doing a two-minute search on Google, Andersen found that "gotenkito" belonged to a young man in Everett, Washington, whose MySpace webpage, "Chad's Wacky Life Stories," allegedly described his interest in computers and even admitted downloading copyrighted materials. Andersen furnished "gotenkito's" details to the RIAA, hoping the lawsuit against her would be dismissed. But instead of dismissing their claims against her, the RIAA continued in their alleged malicious prosecution of Anderson. The suit says:

They repeatedly and publicly claimed that Ms.Anderson stole and possessed songs with titles such as "shake that ass bitch," "dope nose," "die motherfucker die," "bullet in the head," "fuck y'all hoes," "n**ger fucker," and "i stab people."

The suit says Andersen was offended and outraged by the RIAA's allegations, and that she had no interest in the "violent, profane, misogynistic, and racist music that the RIAA and its controlled member companies monoplize." Andersen, according to the suit, "listens only to country music and soft rock."

Furthermore, the suit alleges that the lawsuit exacerbated Andersen's pre-existing disabilities—prior to the suit, she had been forced to leave her position as a case manager at the Department of Justice and was surviving on disability benefits for painful physical illness, emotional and psychological problems. "Before the lawsuit, she had hoped to return to work," the suit alleges. "But her psychological and physical symptoms seriously worsened due to defendants' malicious and outrageous conduct."

When a court order eventually ordered the RIAA to inspect Andersen's hard drive, it found that it had not been used to infringe copyrights. But even then, Andersen's counter-suit alleges the RIAA refused to drop its case against her—the RIAA allegedly saying it would not do so unless Andersen paid an undisclosed amount of money. "They wanted it to appear publicly that they had prevailed," the suit alleges.

When Andersen refused to pay, the RIAA's investigators allegedly began calling her apartment building looking for her daughter, trying to get her to testify against her mother, the suit alleges. "Phone calls were also made to [Andersen's daughter's] former elementary school under false pretenses," the suit further alleges.

After again refusing to drop its lawsuit, the RIAA was required to submit proof of its claims against Andersen in court, but could not do so, and was forced to finally dismiss its case against her on June 1. Now she's suing the shit out of them.