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Judge Says RIAA Can't Have Hard Drive
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A Texas judge has refused to allow the RIAA untrammelled access to the defendant's hard drive in SONY v. Arellanes. The court ruled that only a mutually agreeable, neutral computer forensics expert may examine the hard drive, at the RIAA's expense, and that the parties must agree on mutually acceptable provisions for confidentiality."
Could it mean an end to RIAA extortion in the near future?
about time RIAA is held to the law.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
1) Buy/Pay-off "neutral expert"
2) Resume "business" as normal
3) ???
4) Profit!
With the constant erosion of privacy laws, this is indeed refreshing.
:)
I'm looking forward to the rootkit jokes.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
No, that would be step #2.
/. crowd seems to love the "all or nothing" approach -- if they can't identify the exact files, including MD5 hash of the exact download, the RIAA has no right at all. That isn't the way it works in regular law, so why should music be any different? If they can show probable cause and enough "evidence" to convince a judge for a search warrant, then there needs to be a method -- however imperfect -- for dealing with the process.
Step #1 would require a court order to begin with. After they get the list of audio files, you then identify them: your own recordings, legal rips, out of copyright, etc. The point was they didn't have rights to access the entire drive, but had a court finding to look for certain -- infringing -- files. This weeds out 90% of the chaff up front.
The
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A few points.
First, they don't have to review any file unless they want to, because the plaintiff gets to choose what it bases its case on. If they want to ignore a particular file then it only helps the defendant for them to do so. So your #2 is rather stupid. (Though from my own experiences, I would say that disguising a file adequately could work pretty easily unless the reviewer had some reason to look further, such as if disguised files became a commonly used tactic by infringers)
Second, for files they are initially interested in, I assure you, they really will review them in their entirety. I've had to do this sort of thing myself at times, and let me tell you, it is very boring. But it does brighten the day of the reviewers to come across evidence of illicit workplace romances, affairs, arguments, illegal activities (whether related to the case or not), etc. Regular ol' porn, not so interesting, actually. It's more fun to hear about things than to see them graphically. So don't worry about your #1.
Third, your #3 is again, rather stupid. If a file is found that the plaintiff is going to go to court with, the mere presence of the file is enough to go to the jury with. The defendant can argue that the file was put there by someone else. It is up to the jury to decide who they believe; that is their job. It's no different than if one side had a witness that said he saw the defendant do it, and another witness with the exact opposite story.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Man, what a total lack of personal honor.
Don't forget that you're in the middle of an entire thread that's focused on the art and science of being too cheap to pay an artist a buck for a song. So, yeah.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The proper way to examine a hard disk for evidence of a crime is to image it to another hard drive without TOUCHING the data on the original hard disk. Once the original has been tampered with, it is arguable that any evidence found may have been falsified and is not admissible in court. Also, if they planted spy software on your machine, you can sue them for invasion of privacy. I am pretty sure there is a law somewhere that prohibits unsolicited internet traffic to a computer.
Usually, professionals will use a live cd or similar tool to image the hard disk to another without writing to the disk being imaged. since the live cd loads into RAM and not on the HDD, there is less chance that it will be tampered with accidentally before any data has been accessed. All searches of HDDs are done from an image of the disk and should never be done on the original. standard Sec+ stuff, its dissappointing that the **AA would not follow those guidelines. I guess they really do just hope for the ooc settlements.
If the **AA did what you said they did, they did not follow proper procedure. Then again, they don't seem to be contracting professionals in the field that would know what to do anyway.
Funny.. Though a simple checksum wouldn't be very good. A simple log entry would through it off. A checksum per directory would be better. *If one was to nitpick about the details..*
Store with salt
Wouldn't what they did be considered Breaking and Entering? I know they had some permission, but would what they did be seen as a technicality in your favor?
AVonGauss wrote: "Thank you for taking the time to reply, I am still confused, but I'm probably not the only one - at some point if I cry thief, it seems that I should have to state clearly what has been stolen or violated... Out of curiosity, was that a shared folder in the sense of a file sharing (like torrent) folder or a shared folder as in a Windows or SMB shared folder?"
1. You're certainly not the only one that's confused. The reason I know that is that I'm confused, too. Were I a judge all these cases would have been bounced on day one. These guys have no evidence of anything when they start the case. And then if they can't find some evidence in their fishing expedition, they accuse the defendant of having hid the evidence. It's a joke.
2. All the cases I have seen are Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella, or iMesh.... i.e. FastTrack clients.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Don't forget that you're in the middle of an entire thread that's focused on the art and science of being too cheap to pay an artist a buck for a song.
If we could pay the artist a buck a song, that would be honorable. If we could pay the artist $5 for a CD, that would be even more honorable.
But I'm not going to pay a buck a song while the artist only gets 16 cents. I'm not going to buy another major label record until the RIAA stops suing people and makes a public apology for being such assholes. I'll support the artists I like by buying tickets to their show when and if they come to town.