NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's attempt to get Ms. Lindor's son's desktop computer in UMG v. Lindor has been rejected by the Magistrate Judge. The judge said that the RIAA 'offered little more than speculation to support their request for an inspection of Mr. Raymond's desktop computer, based on ... his family relationship to the defendant, the proximity of his house to the defendant's house, and his determined defense of his mother in this case. That is not enough. On the record before me, plaintiffs have provided scant basis to authorize an inspection of Mr. Raymond's desktop computer.' Decision by Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy. (pdf)"
This has been a bad week for the RIAA, with more going against them than ever before. If you'll allow me a moment...
Yeah!!!
Now back to our normal post. The RIAA is like a bacteria that has multiplied to infect many hosts. However, like a simple bacteria that replicates perfect copies of itself, the RIAA lawsuits are all exact clones. What this means is that, if you can kill one of them, you can kill all of them. Reading the postings just this week on Ray's blog will tell you that the many enemies (a.k.a. innocent defendants who are fighting back) of the RIAA are coordinating and refining their tactics in search of the magic bullet that will kill this plague once and for all. And from the looks of things, they're getting mighty close.
Forgive my ignorance, but... can someone who's actually from the USA explain why the RIAA would get *anyone's* computer at all? Even if there is a reason why it should be inspected at all, shouldn't that be done by a (hopefully) neutral third party, like the police? It seems like a bad idea to me to give someone who's got a vested interest in finding evidence against you an opportunity to plant it.
HARD DRIVE
*Plaintiffs may not have access to the defendant's hard drive; the hard drive must be turned over to a mutually acceptable neutral computer forensics expert; and his report must be done at the RIAA's expense. (SONY v. Arellanes)
The RIAA action is a civil tort case -- not a criminal case. In civil cases in the US both sides are essentially required to turn over all relevant evidence to each other, and then they argue in court which one has the better evidence for their side (preponderance). This is the same type of case that IBM vs SCO is undergoing, and is two private parties.
In criminal cases, the state is the prosecutor (not plaintiff), and jail time may attach. You need a unanimous jury rather than a majority decision. RIAA cannot initiate a criminal case other than to make a complaint to the local police.
You are exactly right about that. At least one judge has held that they cannot have access even to the defendant's hard drive, that it must be done by a neutral third party. SONY v. Arellanes [blogspot.com].
This is a big decision, because it finally sets some limits on the scope of RIAA's fishing expeditions. Its not a surprising decision, given the outcomes of your discovery process with RIAA's witness, and one can only presume that the other shoe, dismissal with prejudice and a court ordered payment of Ms Lindor's legal expenses by the RIAA will soon follow. It will, unfortunately, take a lot more than this to deter the RIAA from this scorched audience policy, but its a step in the right direction. Well done.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday April 02 2007, @02:59AM (#18571165)
Posting anonymously....
In discussions with a real lawyer about all this, my lawyer friend and I came upon the solution...
Should you get The Letter, which has no legal value whatsoever, put a bullet through the drive, do a Jeff Merkey and bash it against a rock, melt it in a Sentry heat treating oven at 2250F (FUN!!). "We're sorry, but the drive no longer exists"
Should you get The Subpoena, it's too late and you're hosed. Bend over and take it or mount a real defense, because if you destroy the drive, it's spoilation of evidence and the court really frowns on that. That's what hosed Jeff Merkey when Novell subpoenaed him.
What if you have three HDs, where HD #1 is your main drive, HD #2 is a decoy with, say, some old photos on it, and HD #3 is the P2P drive. (I run Linux, so keep up here.) You don't have anything listed in/etc/fstab about the partitions on the P2P drive, you mount that manually when you want to do some filesharing. It includes all the applications and data, so that nothing about filesharing appears on HD #1.
Now if you are asked to provide your HD, you make an image of HD #1. No evidence of filesharing there, assuming they figure out what ext3 is. That might be the end of it. But wait, they bring in an expert who actually understands the filesystem and says whoah! the logs say you were mounting some other partitions that don't appear in fstab. Oh, that's right, I sometimes mount HD #2 to fetch old pictures off it, here's an image of that.
It seems to me you'd really have to have your forensics hat on tight to figure out there was actually a third HD in the mix. Even if you did figure it out, think about how the legal proceedings would have gone: (1) We demand to see your HD, judge okays it, no evidence. (2) We "cracked" your scheme and demand to see HD #2, judge reluctantly okays it, no evidence. (3) This time we really cracked it and demand HD #3, judge says this is getting stupid, go screw yourself.
Not really, because the RIAA tactic has been to call everyone a murderer and then ask to search their premises for knives. We have laws against that sort of thing when the police want to do it, and we should have laws against that sort of thing when corporations want to do it.
Not allowing baseless evidence gathering is the same as not allowing baseless search. But casting a very wide net and calling everyone a thief, and then when asked to produce evidence, claiming that you'd have it if you could go searching for it - this is just simply not the way the American justice system works, for better or worse.
Watchers of the news from outside you country have a slightly different opinion about the American justice system. Is looks more like there is a basic system in place that pretends to be fair, but exceptions are so easily made that groups of people a treated in an unfair way.
Watchers of the news from outside you country have a slightly different opinion... exceptions are so easily made that groups of people a treated in an unfair way
Because the rare exception makes for more exciting news than the countless boring reasonably fair cases. It's the same reason why Americans think the rest of the world is constantly having some horrific natural disaster, fighting internal wars, or attending lavish film festivals.
But casting a very wide net and calling everyone a thief, and then when asked to produce evidence, claiming that you'd have it if you could go searching for it
I agree with you on this point. If a crime has been done, then all of the evidence should be investigated, and not just parts of it. You don't get a good picture, and it ends up being that you come to the wrong conclution.
Which actually could be bad for RIAA.
But we want it to be bad for them through the full picture.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday April 02 2007, @01:55AM (#18570961)
You completely missed the point. If a crime has been committed by the son, then a new case with evidence must be brought against him. Since when do we, as Americans, allow witch hunts in order to save failing court cases? The only reason the RIAA is going after the son is because he is vigorously defending his mother and they want to put him back on his heels.
But this isn't about a crime. It's about a tort. No grand jury involved.
Please learn the difference.
One of the reasons why the RIAA isn't asking for criminal charges is that the evidence they have is so slim that even thinking about filing criminal charges, which require a _much_ higher burden of proof, is idiotic.
The RIAA is on pretty thin ice. Their "expert" claims to be a "software engineer" yet when asked if he's got a PE stamp, he says...well...no. Yet another wannabe expert.
Their "expert" claims to be a "software engineer" yet when asked if he's got a PE stamp, he says...well...no. Yet another wannabe expert.
I think I'm a software engineer, and I don't even know what a PE stamp is.
I have a degree in Computer Science, and I have been a systems programmer designing and writing networking software for over 25 years, can I claim that I'm a software engineer?
It stands for Professional Engineer, a kind of licensing process demonstrating knowledge and competence to practice one's profession. They're mostly relevant for civil engineering (i.e., people whose screw-ups end up on the news as "major bridge collapses, 300 dead or missing"). PE also exists for mechanical and electrical engineers, but isn't uniformly required, as far as I know. I've never even heard of PE for anything software related, though some people have argued in favor of such a requirement.
In some locales, you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" unless you have a PE to your name, much like you can't start working as a doctor or lawyer without appropriate paperwork.
I've never even heard of PE for anything software related
My former employer, a California aerospace outfit, ran into something like that around 1970 when it opened a good-sized operation in Denver. There was some bit of paperwork with the city and county that involved listing the number of engineers on the payroll, and the local PE association cried foul: local ordinances forbade representing someone as an "engineer" who didn't have a PE license.
We replied that we would be delighted to come into compliance, and would they please send over eight hundred license applications, a copy of the sample test, eight hundred PE Assn membership applications, and when would their next officer election be?
IANAL, but just because an armed robber lives in the same town as a relative, and they both have cars, and are close, doesn't mean there is need, or cause to search the relatives car for evidence of the crimes committed by the armed robber. Yes, I know that might not be the best analogy, but where is the judge to stop? Can the RIAA look at her neighbor's pc? Can the RIAA request that all her friends computers be searched? If there is no evidence of infringement, well, then there is no evidence. Going fishing in the computers that she might have had access to is just that, fishing.
And iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them...
I'm not supporting the RIAA but this seems wrong to me. If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
She "may have" had access to your computer. That doesn't mean that she did. Even if she did, that doesn't mean that she used it to commit the alleged offense.
It sounds to me like you just don't get it.
If your mother is accused of a crime, why in the hell should they be able to search your property, at a different house, without probable cause?
If the police can't do it for a murder case, why should the RIAA be able to do it for a civil suit?
If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
You're not making sense here. First off, you have to mean if the person they're suing has access and may have used his PC for copyright infringement, should his PC not be investigated? That's the first correction. They've already checked the PC in the house itself, and come up dry. It does not contain the hard drive with any of the infringing files or programs on it.
Secondly, they're not suing the son. So he is not the person they're suing, and they should have no right to anything on his PC just because he's a son who lives 4 miles away and, like any good son should, visits his mother.
Thirdly, if you have your own computer at home, it doesn't make much sense that you'd pack up your computer, drive miles to your Mother's house, and commit copyright infringement there, before packing up your computer once more and driving back home again to use your computer for everything else you normally use it for. Even if you have a notebook computer, do you drive somewhere else to do all your filesharing? That's too much of a reach for even this judge to accept, hence they're not allowed to just look at a non-party's computer hard drive because of a casual relationship between a mother and her son. There is no evidence that the son's computer has ever been in his Mother's house.
It would be like the RIAA saying that, we tracked filesharing to the IP address of your best friend who lives a few miles from you. But because we couldn't find the evidence on his computer, and we know you're friends who often got together at his house, and because you have a computer too, we want to give your computer a digital anal examination as well, hoping we'll find something to incriminate you with. And it's not even like said best friend told the RIAA to get his own butt out of the sling that, "Hey, my best friend always came over with his computer and we downloaded music on it." He would have told them nothing of the sort.
Just playing the devil's advocate... My Mum has an unlimited home DSL account... which she uses to send about 6 mails a month with. It would be perfect to add a router and Mac Mini with a bit torrent client running on it to her existing setup. She would never notice and I could occasionally FTP in and download the files obtained. Then if she ever got into one of these lawsuits I could remove the whole setup and she could honestly deny having anything to do with it.
By the same token, just have two computers a cheapy pirate machine, no real speed power or display quality is required for P2P, a typical $200 odd worth of 2nd hand notebook would be quite sufficient, when they ask for your machine give them them a ghost of your regular machine and drop your pirate machine off at a buddies place for the duration. If your gonna make up stories at least make them realistic;).
I know it is pointless, because the RIAA does not target technophiles that can afford multiple com
And ya know what? That's a defense that your mom's lawyer can use. Indeed, having an insecure POS computer infected with malware, a wide open wireless router, IP addresses being spoofed, etc, yadda yadda yadda, were all used to pull Dr. Jacobson's deposition into a million little pieces in this case.
In other words, there is _no way_, using the RIAA's methods, to definitively trace music files to the specific computer, not after reading Dr. Jacobson's testimony. Read it. The URL is in one of my earlier pos
I'm not supporting the RIAA but this seems wrong to me. If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
A brief history of the case was that the plaintiff (RIAA) demanded that the defendant turn over her computer to their experts for analysis. The defendant objected and would only agree to a third party copying the hard drive and handing the copy over to the plaintiff. The judge ruled in the defendant's favor and the HD was copied. However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy. What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother. Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work). There has to be very compelling reasons for the plaintiff to over come that objection.
A brief history of the case was that the plaintiff (RIAA) demanded that the defendant turn over her computer to their experts for analysis. The defendant objected and would only agree to a third party copying the hard drive and handing the copy over to the plaintiff. The judge ruled in the defendant's favor and the HD was copied.
Sounds like a reasonable judge. Taking the defendant's computer would deprive them of it for a long period of time, whereas taking a copy of it's data only deprives them of it for a short time.
However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy.
Or something as simple as a typo on the part of the plaintiff.
What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother.
To the judge it may look as though the plaintiff is on a "fishing trip".
Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work).
Plenty of people may have confidential material on their computers. A lawyer has the advantage that he or she can phrase this in language a judge is likely to understand.
Incorrect. In this case the defendant turned over her complete hard drive. When the RIAA could find nothing on it to support their case, then they started pursuing her relatives. That's the way they operate.
I'm not supporting the RIAA but this seems wrong to me. If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
It's more like, "You can only have the knives that you have a plausible reason to believe may have been used for that murder." Why should they get the defendant's son's knife, just because he lives 4 miles away from the defendant and vigorously asserts the defendant's innocence? They need a reason to search other people's property; they can't just conjure up a hypothesis out of thin air that the property was used to commit the crime, and use that as justification to examine it.
This is all about intimidation. The RIAA doesn't like the son for defending his mother so vigorously, so they're spitefully trying to fish for evidence on his computer, on the off-chance they might be able to drag him into a lawsuit. They have no probable cause to accuse the son of any wrongdoing, or to assert that the mother is committing infringement using his computer rather than her own, and the judge is perfectly correct in denying their motion.
I'm not supporting the inquisition but this seems wrong to me. If the person being investigated is a woman and has a cat, then shouldn't we see if she floats?
If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
I think you are infringing on the RIAA's copyright. Expect them to take your PC soon.
Get it? It takes more than someone's "say so" to go into someone's private property and rummage through their things. The RIAA has to actually show some sort of proof that you've wronged them, not just "oh, we say you did it". Unfortunately (for them) they
Viacom is being sued for copyright infringement, too (by people whose copyrighted works were the subject of misguided DMCA removal demands to YouTube). I like the idea that these plaintiffs could get, not only all of Viacom's computers, but also all of Viacom's employees' computers.
If you applied the RIAA's "logic" that would probably include computers belonging to any relatives of Viacom employees. "Hand over your PC your third cousin, who you never knew existed, married the second cousin of someone who
The RIAA has been breaking new ground with the legal branch of their customer service division. A large portion of the law is not in the laws that have been passed by legislatures, it is in previous decisions by the judicial system and is called case law.
Since the RIAA's new approach to customer service is, shall we say, innovative decisions in earlier cases can have a great effect on later cases. For example, in a previous RIAA story on Slashdot it was reported that when the RIAA draws a blank in discovery against a particular custo^H^H defendant, then they are liable for the defendants legal fees. This could be a serious blow to the RIAA's current shotgun approach.
Likewise, if this current ruling stands it could help establish limits on how far the RIAA can go poking their nose into other people's business. IMO, the RIAA (like SCO) has greatly abused the legal system to pursue their own selfish and greedy ends. It's great news that the legal system is responding and is putting in limits on how far the RIAA can go.
> This isn't some sort of ideological blow that cuts to the core of the RIAAs actions.
I don't know how ideology applies to this unless you believe that unrestricted fishing expeditions without any real probably cause make good law. If you believe that, then is is a major blow to your ideology, because the judge just said no, I'm not going to allow you to examine computer unless you can directly link that computer to the alleged violation of intellectual property law.
Their policy is to sue people who have paid for an internet access account that they think is linked to a p2p shared files folder.
They know, and don't care, that this will result in many innocent people being sued.
Then if they figure out the defendant didn't do it, they try to use their pending lawsuit against an innocent person as an investigative platform with which to look for others, all the while terrorizing the innocent defendant.
That is exactly what happened here. (The defendant here, in fact, has never even used a computer, believe it or not.).
A ruling like this is important.
The case should have been thrown out a long time ago, but every little bit helps.
The problem with this in the US is that the defendant has to understand that and bring it up in court. A green lawyer might easily be intimidated by some of the RIAA's paper work and anyone representing themselves is usually SOL on properly discrediting bad evidence, we tend to understand the theory, but not the procedure.
Actually, the big thing that emerged in discovery is that they hadn't done any real police work.
All they had was one expert witness who wrote three statements, all of them questionable on a number of grounds, based on a ten minute examination of a hard drive and additional examination of IP records generated by software that has dubious reliability and a statement from Verizon about an IP address that could easily have been wrong in several different ways.
That's one of the big reasons this case is crumbling and, from all appearances, taking a lot of RIAA cases with it.
The truth is that this was never about good "police" work. It was about intimidation; about identifying people who could be easily intimidated and railroading them with a blizzard of impressive looking paperwork; about using their settlements to intimidate others into not accessing online audio files, even when it was perfectly legal to do so. The intimidation worked (and continues to work to some extent) because the legal costs of fighting this RIAA paperwork were much higher than the price of a settlement.
While many people agree with you that April Fool's day on Slashdot is indeed way over the top, it's still no reason for insulting random strangers that did you no harm.
Bad Week for the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah!!!
Now back to our normal post. The RIAA is like a bacteria that has multiplied to infect many hosts. However, like a simple bacteria that replicates perfect copies of itself, the RIAA lawsuits are all exact clones. What this means is that, if you can kill one of them, you can kill all of them. Reading the postings just this week on Ray's blog will tell you that the many enemies (a.k.a. innocent defendants who are fighting back) of the RIAA are coordinating and refining their tactics in search of the magic bullet that will kill this plague once and for all. And from the looks of things, they're getting mighty close.
Forgive my ignorance... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Forgive my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
*Plaintiffs may not have access to the defendant's hard drive; the hard drive must be turned over to a mutually acceptable neutral computer forensics expert; and his report must be done at the RIAA's expense. (SONY v. Arellanes)
they can't [blogspot.com]
Parent
Re:Forgive my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
The RIAA action is a civil tort case -- not a criminal case. In civil cases in the US both sides are essentially required to turn over all relevant evidence to each other, and then they argue in court which one has the better evidence for their side (preponderance). This is the same type of case that IBM vs SCO is undergoing, and is two private parties.
In criminal cases, the state is the prosecutor (not plaintiff), and jail time may attach. You need a unanimous jury rather than a majority decision. RIAA cannot initiate a criminal case other than to make a complaint to the local police.
Parent
Re:Forgive my ignorance... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Artists funding this action (Score:5, Informative)
Amy Winehouse
Bon Jovi
Charlatans
Counting Crows
Limp Bizkit
Live
Ocean Color Scene
Puddle of Mudd
Sonic Youth
Texas
The Who
By buying anything from these or any other UMG artist, you are helping to fund these lawsuits. Please stop!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Congratulations (Score:3, Insightful)
Soo...some ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
In discussions with a real lawyer about all this, my lawyer friend and I came upon the solution...
Should you get The Letter, which has no legal value whatsoever, put a bullet through the drive, do a Jeff Merkey and bash it against a rock, melt it in a Sentry heat treating oven at 2250F (FUN!!). "We're sorry, but the drive no longer exists"
Should you get The Subpoena, it's too late and you're hosed. Bend over and take it or mount a real defense, because if you destroy the drive, it's spoilation of evidence and the court really frowns on that. That's what hosed Jeff Merkey when Novell subpoenaed him.
Timing is everything.
Re:Soo...some ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
What if you have three HDs, where HD #1 is your main drive, HD #2 is a decoy with, say, some old photos on it, and HD #3 is the P2P drive. (I run Linux, so keep up here.) You don't have anything listed in /etc/fstab about the partitions on the P2P drive, you mount that manually when you want to do some filesharing. It includes all the applications and data, so that nothing about filesharing appears on HD #1.
Now if you are asked to provide your HD, you make an image of HD #1. No evidence of filesharing there, assuming they figure out what ext3 is. That might be the end of it. But wait, they bring in an expert who actually understands the filesystem and says whoah! the logs say you were mounting some other partitions that don't appear in fstab. Oh, that's right, I sometimes mount HD #2 to fetch old pictures off it, here's an image of that.
It seems to me you'd really have to have your forensics hat on tight to figure out there was actually a third HD in the mix. Even if you did figure it out, think about how the legal proceedings would have gone: (1) We demand to see your HD, judge okays it, no evidence. (2) We "cracked" your scheme and demand to see HD #2, judge reluctantly okays it, no evidence. (3) This time we really cracked it and demand HD #3, judge says this is getting stupid, go screw yourself.
Parent
To follow up even further... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070302
This is why the RIAA wants to go on a fishing expedition. They have no case, and what they have is
--
BMO
Your money are used to sue you or your friends. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you stop paying them they will fold with less collateral damage, and music will be free sooner.
Not really, because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not allowing baseless evidence gathering is the same as not allowing baseless search. But casting a very wide net and calling everyone a thief, and then when asked to produce evidence, claiming that you'd have it if you could go searching for it - this is just simply not the way the American justice system works, for better or worse.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is looks more like there is a basic system in place that pretends to be fair, but exceptions are so easily made that groups of people a treated in an unfair way.
Re:Not really, because... (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the rare exception makes for more exciting news than the countless boring reasonably fair cases. It's the same reason why Americans think the rest of the world is constantly having some horrific natural disaster, fighting internal wars, or attending lavish film festivals.
Parent
Re:Not really, because... (Score:4, Funny)
How naive!
Answered from my Blackberry at a lavish film festival.
Parent
Re:Not really, because... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds exactly like SCO. :)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which actually could be bad for RIAA.
But we want it to be bad for them through the full picture.
Right?
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Informative)
But this isn't about a crime. It's about a tort. No grand jury involved.
Please learn the difference.
One of the reasons why the RIAA isn't asking for criminal charges is that the evidence they have is so slim that even thinking about filing criminal charges, which require a _much_ higher burden of proof, is idiotic.
The RIAA is on pretty thin ice. Their "expert" claims to be a "software engineer" yet when asked if he's got a PE stamp, he says...well...no. Yet another wannabe expert.
--
BMO
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I'm a software engineer, and I don't even know what a PE stamp is.
I have a degree in Computer Science, and I have been a systems programmer designing and writing networking software for over 25 years, can I claim that I'm a software engineer?
So... what is a "PE stamp"?
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
In some locales, you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" unless you have a PE to your name, much like you can't start working as a doctor or lawyer without appropriate paperwork.
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
My former employer, a California aerospace outfit, ran into something like that around 1970 when it opened a good-sized operation in Denver. There was some bit of paperwork with the city and county that involved listing the number of engineers on the payroll, and the local PE association cried foul: local ordinances forbade representing someone as an "engineer" who didn't have a PE license.
We replied that we would be delighted to come into compliance, and would they please send over eight hundred license applications, a copy of the sample test, eight hundred PE Assn membership applications, and when would their next officer election be?
Last we ever heard from them.
rj
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
She "may have" had access to your computer. That doesn't mean that she did. Even if she did, that doesn't mean that she used it to commit the alleged offense.
It sounds to me like you just don't get it.
If your mother is accused of a crime, why in the hell should they be able to search your property, at a different house, without probable cause?
If the police can't do it for a murder case, why should the RIAA be able to do it for a civil suit?
LK
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not making sense here. First off, you have to mean if the person they're suing has access and may have used his PC for copyright infringement, should his PC not be investigated? That's the first correction. They've already checked the PC in the house itself, and come up dry. It does not contain the hard drive with any of the infringing files or programs on it.
Secondly, they're not suing the son. So he is not the person they're suing, and they should have no right to anything on his PC just because he's a son who lives 4 miles away and, like any good son should, visits his mother.
Thirdly, if you have your own computer at home, it doesn't make much sense that you'd pack up your computer, drive miles to your Mother's house, and commit copyright infringement there, before packing up your computer once more and driving back home again to use your computer for everything else you normally use it for. Even if you have a notebook computer, do you drive somewhere else to do all your filesharing? That's too much of a reach for even this judge to accept, hence they're not allowed to just look at a non-party's computer hard drive because of a casual relationship between a mother and her son. There is no evidence that the son's computer has ever been in his Mother's house.
It would be like the RIAA saying that, we tracked filesharing to the IP address of your best friend who lives a few miles from you. But because we couldn't find the evidence on his computer, and we know you're friends who often got together at his house, and because you have a computer too, we want to give your computer a digital anal examination as well, hoping we'll find something to incriminate you with. And it's not even like said best friend told the RIAA to get his own butt out of the sling that, "Hey, my best friend always came over with his computer and we downloaded music on it." He would have told them nothing of the sort.
Now do you get it?
Parent
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I know it is pointless, because the RIAA does not target technophiles that can afford multiple com
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's a defense that your mom's lawyer can use. Indeed, having an insecure POS computer infected with malware, a wide open wireless router, IP addresses being spoofed, etc, yadda yadda yadda, were all used to pull Dr. Jacobson's deposition into a million little pieces in this case.
In other words, there is _no way_, using the RIAA's methods, to definitively trace music files to the specific computer, not after reading Dr. Jacobson's testimony. Read it. The URL is in one of my earlier pos
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
A brief history of the case was that the plaintiff (RIAA) demanded that the defendant turn over her computer to their experts for analysis. The defendant objected and would only agree to a third party copying the hard drive and handing the copy over to the plaintiff. The judge ruled in the defendant's favor and the HD was copied. However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy. What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother. Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work). There has to be very compelling reasons for the plaintiff to over come that objection.
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a reasonable judge. Taking the defendant's computer would deprive them of it for a long period of time, whereas taking a copy of it's data only deprives them of it for a short time.
However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy.
Or something as simple as a typo on the part of the plaintiff.
What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother.
To the judge it may look as though the plaintiff is on a "fishing trip".
Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work).
Plenty of people may have confidential material on their computers. A lawyer has the advantage that he or she can phrase this in language a judge is likely to understand.
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
It's more like, "You can only have the knives that you have a plausible reason to believe may have been used for that murder." Why should they get the defendant's son's knife, just because he lives 4 miles away from the defendant and vigorously asserts the defendant's innocence? They need a reason to search other people's property; they can't just conjure up a hypothesis out of thin air that the property was used to commit the crime, and use that as justification to examine it.
This is all about intimidation. The RIAA doesn't like the son for defending his mother so vigorously, so they're spitefully trying to fish for evidence on his computer, on the off-chance they might be able to drag him into a lawsuit. They have no probable cause to accuse the son of any wrongdoing, or to assert that the mother is committing infringement using his computer rather than her own, and the judge is perfectly correct in denying their motion.
-Mike
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Funny)
She turned me into a newt!
What? Well, I got better!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you are infringing on the RIAA's copyright. Expect them to take your PC soon.
Get it? It takes more than someone's "say so" to go into someone's private property and rummage through their things. The RIAA has to actually show some sort of proof that you've wronged them, not just "oh, we say you did it". Unfortunately (for them) they
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If you applied the RIAA's "logic" that would probably include computers belonging to any relatives of Viacom employees. "Hand over your PC your third cousin, who you never knew existed, married the second cousin of someone who
Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of people don't think that far.
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
That oughta do it.
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Re:not supporting the RIAA (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the RIAA's new approach to customer service is, shall we say, innovative decisions in earlier cases can have a great effect on later cases. For example, in a previous RIAA story on Slashdot it was reported that when the RIAA draws a blank in discovery against a particular custo^H^H defendant, then they are liable for the defendants legal fees. This could be a serious blow to the RIAA's current shotgun approach.
Likewise, if this current ruling stands it could help establish limits on how far the RIAA can go poking their nose into other people's business. IMO, the RIAA (like SCO) has greatly abused the legal system to pursue their own selfish and greedy ends. It's great news that the legal system is responding and is putting in limits on how far the RIAA can go.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know how ideology applies to this unless you believe that unrestricted fishing expeditions without any real probably cause make good law. If you believe that, then is is a major blow to your ideology, because the judge just said no, I'm not going to allow you to examine computer unless you can directly link that computer to the alleged violation of intellectual property law.
> It's a mundane legal decision in
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Their policy is to sue people who have paid for an internet access account that they think is linked to a p2p shared files folder.
They know, and don't care, that this will result in many innocent people being sued.
Then if they figure out the defendant didn't do it, they try to use their pending lawsuit against an innocent person as an investigative platform with which to look for others, all the while terrorizing the innocent defendant.
That is exactly what happened here. (The defendant here, in fact, has never even used a computer, believe it or not.).
A ruling like this is important.
The case should have been thrown out a long time ago, but every little bit helps.
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Re:Now, what am I supposed to believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why does the RIAA do police work anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
All they had was one expert witness who wrote three statements, all of them questionable on a number of grounds, based on a ten minute examination of a hard drive and additional examination of IP records generated by software that has dubious reliability and a statement from Verizon about an IP address that could easily have been wrong in several different ways.
That's one of the big reasons this case is crumbling and, from all appearances, taking a lot of RIAA cases with it.
The truth is that this was never about good "police" work. It was about intimidation; about identifying people who could be easily intimidated and railroading them with a blizzard of impressive looking paperwork; about using their settlements to intimidate others into not accessing online audio files, even when it was perfectly legal to do so. The intimidation worked (and continues to work to some extent) because the legal costs of fighting this RIAA paperwork were much higher than the price of a settlement.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While many people agree with you that April Fool's day on Slashdot is indeed way over the top, it's still no reason for insulting random strangers that did you no harm.