TEEN TO SUE OVER PIRACY

A 16-year-old boy could blow the amps of the music industry for its history of strong-arming kids out of as much as $1,000 for a single 99-cent music download made illegally.

The teen, Robert Santangelo of Wappingers Falls, is unleashing one of the boldest legal fights against the industry’s tactics over music piracy, accusing the music labels – Electra, Virgin, Universal Music and Sony BMG – of extortion, widespread conspiracy to break business laws and shakedowns as cruel as a loan shark.

The counterattack came Tuesday in White Plains federal court following a three-month legal fight over charges that the teen and his sister Michelle, 20, along with their soccer mom Patricia, 42, stole more than 1,000 tunes from the record companies by using music-piracy software.

Although the family’s computer was destroyed in a fire five months before the alleged music-piracy occurred, the family was hauled into court under whispered threats of possible jail and ruined credit unless they paid tens of thousands of dollars in penalties, they said.

The Santangelos resisted, but meanwhile, court records show a neighborhood boy admitted he had pirated some of the tunes by secretly installing software on the family’s computer before it was damaged in the fire, and settled his crimes separately by paying a cash settlement to the music labels.