MediaPost reports that the major record labels are denying that they brought a "sham lawsuit" against Tanya Andersen, an Oregon resident who was wrongly accused of piracy and is now pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry.

"Defendants deny that MediaSentry (the RIAA's investigative arm) conducts illegal, flawed and personally invasive private investigations of private citizens," the record industry argued in papers filed last week with a federal district court in Oregon, according to the report. "The damage alleged to have been sustained by plaintiff was caused in whole or in part by her own culpable conduct," the company stated.

For her part, Andersen argues that MediaSentry "claims to employ secret methods to enter individual computers to surreptitiously and illegally gather information without authorization or knowledge of the computer owner. In reality and at best, MediaSentry is only capable of identifying an Internet protocol address that may have been associated with or assigned to a particular computer or routing device."

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