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."

Comments

Stupid?

[mseeger]

Hi,

destroying evidence after receiving a court order is always a stupid thing to do. The question for me is: How did they proved the data was destroyed after the defendant receivced the court order?

Regards, Martin

What the?

[CRC'99]

Wouldn't a more believable reply have been "My computer crashed and it wouldn't boot up. The only way I could get it going again was to get a friend to reformat it".

This seems bogus.

[commodoresloat]

The court rendered default judgement because it determined that the plaintiff acted in bad faith, showing "blatant contempt" for the court and a "fundamental disregard for the judicial process." This makes no sense. Charge her with contempt of court and obstruction of justice, fine. The article claims the court wanted to deter her from doing it again and set an example by punishing her -- I'm sorry, but a week in the can will do that trick just fine. Contempt and obstruction are serious criminal offenses. But rendering default judgement here is tantamount to saying that the lack of evidence here is evidence in itself. On top of it, the court implicitly endorses whatever the hell value the plaintiffs decide to attribute to the allegedly "stolen" songs (and the court's decision can be cited in future cases as evidence that said value is reasonable). I realize the judge wants to "set an example" that evidence-tampering is wrong, but you do that by using the criminal sanctions that are already available for evidence tampering. I'm not ANAL, and I'm not a lawyer either, but this is a strange governmental endorsement and protectionism of a corporation's interests in a supposedly free market, no?

Re:This seems bogus.

[commodoresloat]

But evidence destruction is not itself prima facie evidence of guilt. There could be a million reasons why you might have destroyed the evidence, and if one of those reasons is plausible would likely constitute reasonable doubt in a criminal case unless there was other evidence that you actually committed a crime. In a civil case the burden is usually "a preponderence of evidence"; I don't think the evidence that you destroyed evidence would be enough to cut it. Presumably, the record lawyers will claim they have additional evidence but now it doesn't come up - the judgement defaulted to them. In addition, this wasn't the reason given by the court, at least in the article -- the court just said they wanted to punish her for "contempt of court" and obstruction of justice. Those charges do not seem to have been filed against her at all. The article said they wanted to "make an example" of her.

Destroying the data stopped sharing!

[noidentity]

[...] the Western District of Texas has shown little mercy on a defendant accused by record companies of illegal file-sharing. Knowing that a court order was in place requiring her to turn over her hard drive to be copied, the defendant allegedly used "wiping" software [...]

Bah, the judge is just miffed that he didn't get a copy of all her music. She did the right thing by putting an immediate stop to such blatant file-sharing, by the courts even!

</sarcasm>

Given that the record companies' expert opined that the defendant had downloaded over 200 sound recordings during 2005,

Eh? Since when is the recipient of an unauthorized copy guilty of copyright infringement? I though it was just the provider of the unauthorized copy.

So, if someone...

[CrazyDuke]

...has a porn collection, gets their hard drive subpoenaed, had a file sharing client installed at somepoint on the PC, and deletes the pron because they feel they don't want their fetishes being a part of the public record; they are guilty by default?

Re:Virus?

[legoburner]

Viruses have already been used in the UK to get a positive judgement in computer misuse cases. One person got off child porn charges as he had a few viruses on his machine, and as such he was deemed not to be in control of the machine and therefore not responsible.

Dumb, dumb, dumb

[99luftballon]

In terms of a defence wiping your hard drive is pretty much an admission of guilt. You're saying to the court that you don't want to allow them to see any evidence and it's hard to see how the judge could have done otherwise. But it sets a worrying legal precedent. I use Eraser software to regularly overwrite deleted sectors of my hard drive and it could be argued that if I deleted a downloaded song and then overwrote the sector repeatedly I was tampering with evidence. Surely the best defence would be to find out what songs you are being prosecuted for and then buying the album/game/DVD. Arguing in court that you tried the music and so bought the album, thus actually profiting the RIAA and its minions, would make an interesting defence.

Re:Any lawyers here?

[pgpckt]

IANAL - This is not legal advice.

Will a law student do?

First of all, the court does not consider guilt to be proven. Guilt is what a criminal has. This is a civil case. What it means is that the court considers liability proven.

I am going to assume that this was a bifurcated ("two part") trial. There are two phases in a bifurcated trial: liability and damages. A default judgment resolves the issue of liability, the first phase. The issue of damages is the second phase. So yes, it is contestable, as both sides argue how much damages are needed to make the plaintiff whole.

However, if RIAA is entitled to statutory damages (i.e., $ 750 - $150,000 per violation; see 17 USC 504) then that controls the damages phase. Yhere is no need for RIAA to prove anything to get the minimum relief provided for by statute (the number of violations having been decided in the liability phase). If they want to get more then the minimum, they will have to provide some argument as to why more damages are warranted in this case. The damages could also be lowered to $200 per violation if the defendant can prove good faith infringement. However, I do not know enough about the fact in this case to know whether or not the statutory provision applies in this particular case. I (nor probably anyone else) also can not intelligently speculate as to what damages will ultimately be awarded in this particular case.

IANAL - This is not legal advice.