Re: Michael - The Great Album Debate (Only Go Here if You Want To Continue The Controversy)
She said it is not so easy to just go to court and sue someone. The first thing you have to do is prove damages. She said if this cannot be proved, the judge would throw it out before it even got to Sony. She recommends firstly writing a letter to Sony and asking for our money back and state the reason why. She said if they gave the money back, that's about as far as we could take it. She said if they did not give our money back, then we could go further. She said it would be hard to bring a fraud case against Sony because we would have to prove that they knew the songs were fake before hand (which would be difficult to do even if we could prove that the tracks were fake). I asked her about suing the Cascios, and she said that would be difficult because they did not have a responsibility towards us, they had a responsibility towards Sony. So we would have to get them on our sides since in that case they would be the victim. And they would have to admit the tracks were fake (which they would never do). She said we really have no damages except the cost of the CD if we bought them.
We could bring an injunction against Sony to get them to stop using the songs, if we could prove they are fake. But she said that was difficult to stem from an accusation of fraud since that would be what we would claim since most fraud cases are about damages. She said legally, there would be very little we could do. She said we could try to force them to show us the reports from their independent voal analysts, but they don't have a responsibility to do so, so we would probably never get that. I asked her about a class action lawsuit, but we are from so many different countries and laws governing things like this.
Anyway, she says a first step is to ask for our money back by letter. So I will try to draft a letter to Sony asking for my money back and see what response they give to that. That will determine what we could do next.
She said there are state agencies that fight on behalf of citizens of their state who have been defrauded ny an organization, such as in the foreclosure loans in the states. But, that was a case of people losing their homes, not because of a CD with fake songs.
She said she will confer with more people at her job after she hears the songs in the next day or two, so i will keep you updated.
