Programmer Challenges RIAA Investigators

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In court papers filed today in Manhattan federal court, programmer Zi Mei has slammed the investigation on which the 'ex parte' orders obtained in the RIAA's cases against consumers are based. Armed with Mei's affidavit, a midwesterner -- sued in Atlantic v. Does 1-25 in New York City as 'John Doe Number 8' -- has asked the judge to vacate the 'ex parte' order on the ground that the RIAA doesn't have the evidence it needs to get such an order. If Doe wins, the RIAA's subpoenas to the ISP, for its subscriber's identities, will be thrown out."

Comments

ex parte

[Black Parrot]

Here is an explanation of "ex parte".

Re:ex parte

[eatmadust]

or here on wikipedia.

Re:ex parte

[thebdj]

Ok here is the most recent info I found:

agricultural products (soybeans, fruit, corn) 9.2%, industrial supplies (organic chemicals) 26.8%, capital goods (transistors, aircraft, motor vehicle parts, computers, telecommunications equipment) 49.0%, consumer goods (automobiles, medicines) 15.0% (2003)

The entertainment industry would fall into that 15% for "consumer goods", which means that over 85% of the US exports have absolutely nothing to do with American entertainment. Don't forget, many countries think our music sucks about as much as we think theirs does. As a side note, by the 2004 numbers the US is the 2nd largest exporter of goods at $795 billion. Germany is the only single country who exports more. The EU exports $1,109 billion, but they are not a single country, but if you did count them that makes the US 3rd.

Despite what you might think the US still makes a good chunk of change on its exports and not so much of it would be the entertainment industry. I think what you mean is that the US imports more then it exports, which is quite true, but this is largely because we are a huge consumer. I think the only category listed above for which we are considered a "net exporter" is the Agriculture industry.

Ex Parte

[Shadow Wrought]

IANAL, but have been paralegalling for a few years now. Ex parte is the term used when one side in a case speaks with the Judge without the other side being privy to what is said.

If he can get this tossed it would be a pretty big blow to the RIAA's case.

Re:Yea that will work

[dark404]

except that this is a civil case, not a criminal one, and a motion for discovery not a request for a warrent.

documents

[hylander_sb]

Any mirrors of these documents? I'm getting empty files on their site.

Re:what the fuck

[BrynM]

Right now the RIAA is the only person...

Never say that.

alternate link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.p2pnet.net/stuff/atlantic_does1-25_ziaf fidavit.pdf

Not get picky...but...

[redwoodtree]

programmer Zi Mei has slammed the investigation on which the 'ex parte'

No.... actually, progammer Zi Mei's LAYWER has slammed the investigation. Unless he's a lawyer and a programmer of course, in which case it should say "programmer and lawyer..." But I digress.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm no fan of laywers, but let's give them a little credit here and say that they've come up with a good way to defend this Mei guy. If anything Mei can afford a good lawyer, yay!

...........Anyway... back to digging for slugs....

Re:Not get picky...but...

[rodentia]

No, actually, Zi Mei is a programmer hired by lawyers for John Doe #8, party to Atlantic vs John Does #1-25, to investigate and give expert opinion upon the RIAA's evidence gathering. Mei hasn't been accused of anything.

Read before you pick.

Anyone able to get at those PDFs?

[TheSkyIsPurple]

I keep getting 0 bytes files... even from coral cache...

I really want to read what was filed for this

Re:what the fuck

[Krach42]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_entity

Courts deal with "persons", which are actually legal entities. It just so happens that in the vast majority of cases, legal entities are confined in squishy tissue boundaries.

But there are a number of "persons" who can appear before court that aren't confined in squishy tissue boundaries. (btw, that's a real legal term... squishy tissue boundary...)

sorry, I just got totally sidetracked there...

Gramm Leach Bliley

[TubeSteak]

http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/privacyinitiatives/glba ct.html

The Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the "Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act" or GLB Act, includes provisions to protect consumers' personal financial information held by financial institutions. There are three principal parts to the privacy requirements: the Financial Privacy Rule, Safeguards Rule and pretexting provisions.

The GLB Act gives authority to eight federal agencies and the states to administer and enforce the Financial Privacy Rule and the Safeguards Rule. These two regulations apply to "financial institutions," which include not only banks, securities firms, and insurance companies, but also companies providing many other types of financial products and services to consumers. Among these services are lending, brokering or servicing any type of consumer loan, transferring or safeguarding money, preparing individual tax returns, providing financial advice or credit counseling, providing residential real estate settlement services, collecting consumer debts and an array of other activities. Such non-traditional "financial institutions" are regulated by the FTC. ...

I think the defining part of the above description is: financial products and [financial] services to consumers.

I'm not sure how this applies to ISPs in any way shape or form.

My ISP doesn't provide a financial service...

Re:This always happens....

[JesseHathaway]

...the RIAA should have to be forced to show the actual loss in revenue from each song, and where do they come up with the numbers they sue people for.

This Harvard Business School/UNC-Chapel Hill study tackles this question of whether the RIAA's bellyaching is warranted, and is quite interesting.
To sum it up, it found that file-sharing actually increased the sales of albums which contained the most popularly downloaded tracks, contrary to the findings of an earlier study.

From the Oberholzer/Strumpf study (March 2004):

We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world's downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.

TFA:
http://www.nber.org/~confer/2004/URCs04/felix.pdf
For those who wish to read it in a non-annoying format:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cach e:u2jUjTCu3-0J:www.nber.org/~confer/2004/URCs04/fe lix.pdf+author:%22Oberholzer%22+intitle:%22The+Eff ect+of+file+sharing+on+record+sales:+an+empirical+ ...%22

Re:down with Media Sentry

[Sancho]

Exposition: I am a network security analyst for a university. We have a group that solely handles "incidents" such as copyright infringement, spam notices, etc. That team delivers (and probably filters) incidents to the security group, who then scan the firewall logs for any evidence of network activity with the intersection of the timestamps, IP, and ports reported. We then return that information plus the name of the alleged infringer to the incident team.

I don't know if the RIAA uses multiple firms or if the incident team filters out the infringement notices, but I have never once received a notice without a timestamp. The notices I receive have the IP, timestamp, ports, p2p network, and infringing filename. We occasionally get the IP address that detected the infringement, too.

This tells me one of two things: 1) You're exaggerating or outright lying, because every notice I receive has the appropriate information.
or
2) The incident team returns notices which do not include the necessary information, in which case your ISP could do the exact same thing.