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P2P Defendant Destroys Evidence, Case Defaults
neoflexycurrent writes "A court in Texas has thrown the book at a defendant accused by the RIAA of file sharing. The court determined that she had intentionally wiped her hard drive clean, so it entered the most severe sanction possible — default judgment against her. The record companies now just have to ask the court how much they want in damages."
The record companies' expert witness examined her hard drive, and somehow determined that two "disk-cleaner utility programs" (as the court put it) had been used to delete data intentionally. Specifically, he noted that iMesh and BearShare were installed at one time, and were configured to use the handle, "ugotburnedby21".
:-).
The defendant's own expert witness, who also examined the hard drive, conceded that data had been deleted, but suggested that a defrag utility was to blame. The court didn't buy this explanation, however.
If you're interested, read the court's order (please be gentle with my server
[sarcasm]Yay for justice![/sarcasm]
When in this sort of situation, it is much more desirable for your evidence to be stolen rather than destroyed. Unfortunately, to fake a burglary (or even get insurance to pay...) is a crime. I'd obviously never advise anyone to commit such a crime, mind you. It is a fact, however, that such a crime will be much, much less expensive than letting the RIAA have their way with you.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
blow your mind already
The record companies' expert witness examined her hard drive, and somehow determined that two "disk-cleaner utility programs" (as the court put it) had been used to delete data intentionally. Specifically, he noted that iMesh and BearShare were installed at one time, and were configured to use the handle, "ugotburnedby21".
Stupid. If there was anything left to find, or anything hat pointed to when the wiping was done, then the disk was not wiped. More likely this person only wiped specific folders. To say it again: You have to wipe the complete drive. You have to sacrifice your installation. Only then will no evidence be left and no evidence that can tell when the drive was wiped.
Of course this usually applies to protecting confidential data, such as when giving old drives to charity, selling them or discarding them without physical destruction. The "destruction of evidence" is a minor application, but illustrates well what can happen if you use sloppy security procedures.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
>200*$150,000 = $30,000,000. Of course, this is just a maximum, but it's still scary.
The minimum penalty is 750$ per song, making for a total of 150.000$ for the 200 songs. I'd say that you don't need to calculate the maximum to become scared.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
Exactly. Is it really that hard to find evidence that shows the date of an installation?
Probably. This is why a clean install would be the wrong thing to do. Reimaging a drive would be far more ambigous. What you would have then is a drive where most of the files are before x date. That would be suspicious but not as suspicious as running an OEM recovery CD. I can even think of a way to handle that. You need a script that backdates the clock to the image creation date, touches some appropriate files, forward dates the clock a bit then touches more files. The script will repeat the bump-date-touch-move-forward routine until it reaches the present. The script itself should be run from a CD or other media.
Before reimaging, it would be advisable to overwrite the drive with random number. After re-imaging and date-scripting, the install should be exercised with as many apps run and closed as possible as well and creating a deleting files to create plausible on-disk data structures.
I notice that it says nothing about earning money. It says one has an exclusive right to the discovery. One may give it away, portion it out to a few, sell it, or hoard it as one sees fit.
Also, the post I was responding to made earning money off of a copy a prerequisit to violating copyright law. It isn't.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
So as a serious legal question out there to people who are in the know, what if the RIAA or MPAA logged my IP address last month and are in the process of subpenoing my ISP? That process can take over 6 months. Are they going to say "He erased his hard drives, so he must be guilty." They can't determine when I erased them, so are they going to claim that I destroyed evidence after I get the letter in 5 months? Can a guy really have a change of heart and do the right thing, only to get more severely punished than if he had kept up the offensive action?
OK, it's Slashdot, so obviously I'm going to answer even though IANAL. I have, however, had work product subpoenaed in cases involving my clients in the past. There is a lot of misinformation in this thread, and confusion about being served, receiving a "court order" and being subpoenaed. Service is a generic term that applies to the process of delivering court documents to a party in the action. It could be the lawsuit itself, it could be a subpoena to appear in court, or it could be something related to document production.
The key here is the subpoena or an anticipated subpoena. A subpoena for document production will specify exactly what you are being asked to provide. Once you've received the subpoena, you are clearly obligated not to destroy any of the requested documents if you have them. You haven't been subpoenaed, so you're clear in this respect. There is a grey area where you aren't permitted to destroy documents when you know there's an investigation. This was a key element in the DoJ's lawsuit against Arthur Andersen for shredding Enron documents -- that they knew that an investigation was being performed and that their responsibility to not destroy documents existed prior to their receipt of the subpoena.
(In case you don't know the whole story -- Arthur Andersen started shredding documents when informed by Enron that the SEC had initiated an investigation and stopped shredding documents the second they received a subpoena. They were convicted of obstruction charges. Those charges were overturned by the Supreme Court on the basis of improper jury instructions. The Supreme Court left open the question of when a company has a duty not to destroy documents. It is safe to say that this obligation pre-dates the issuance of a subpoena in some cases.)
There is nothing illegal about routinely shredding business documents you are no longer using. There is nothing wrong with some guy deleting files from his computer that he is no longer using. The case in this article is about someone maliciously destroying files they knew were relevent to a court proceeding with the intent of obstructing their prosecution. It's a pretty straightforward set of facts and not at all similar to what you've done.