WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) – Patricia Santangelo just wanted to save money, but it didn’t take long for the mother of five to realize it was unrealistic to act as her own lawyer against the music companies that were accusing her of illegal downloading.

And it didn’t take long for the Internet crowd to help her out.

Santangelo, who is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for allegedly pirating songs, said Thursday that pending court approval she is hiring attorney Jordan Glass for her defense in the civil case in White Plains.

The Wappingers Falls woman says she never downloaded any songs and if it was done on her computer by her children or their friends it’s the fault of a file-sharing program for allowing them to do it.

The RIAA won’t comment directly on her case, but spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen said Thursday, “Our goal with all these anti-piracy efforts is to protect the ability of the recording industry to invest in new bands and new music and give legal online services a chance to flourish.”

Because Santangelo’s defense was emptying her bank account, she had dropped her previous lawyer. When she appeared in court on Dec. 22 she was the attorney of record, all alone at the defense table.

That went fine, because all she had to do was say, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to the judge’s questions about scheduling and exchange of evidence.

But then, she said, came the avalanche of paper as the RIAA’s law firm sent her requests for evidence plus the material it was sharing with her in the pretrial process known as discovery.

“If I could show you the stack of paper, the stuff I had to do, the demands on my life,” Santangelo said in an interview after a brief court session. “All of a sudden I felt very small. It was overwhelming. … It was fear.”

Glass called discovery “a synonym for $50,000.”

“You can be your own lawyer, but you still have to pay for depositions, copying and the rest of it,” Glass said. “As bright as Patti is, the legal process is specific, and it can be daunting.”

Fortunately for Santangelo, her cause has resounded in the online precincts of those who criticize the RIAA’s tactics and defend the right to the peer-to-peer networks like the ones the RIAA said were used on her computer. More than 16,000 people have been sued by the RIAA, and nearly 4,000 have settled. Santangelo has refused to settle, turning down what she said was a $3,500 offer – much less than the $24,000 she already has spent.

Jon Newton, founder of an Internet site critical of the record companies, said Thursday that $5,699.63 had been raised online for Santangelo in a campaign he started, using the PayPal online payment service. Santangelo said it was that money that enabled her to hire Glass.

Newton, who lives on Vancouver Island on Canada’s west coast, said by e-mail that the contributions have come from “ordinary kids, musicians, students, moms, dads, writers, waiters, programmers, bus drivers, artists.”

“We’re trying to help Patti take on what’s become the common enemy – the corporate music industry, with its bottomless pockets and legions of lawyers,” he said.

The RIAA’s Engebretsen, however, said some of those donors might be victims of illegal downloading because the decline in CD sales since 1999 “has taken a tremendous toll on the music community as a whole – from thousands of layoffs, to songwriters out of work and new artists just not getting signed.”

—

On the Net:

Recording Industry Association of America: http://www.riaa.com

Defense lawyers’ blog on RIAA cases: http://www.recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com

AP-ES-01-26-06 1812EST