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Judge Says RIAA Can't Have Hard Drive

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the quite-a-large-beast-to-be-jumping-through-hoops dept.

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."

7 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. woo, guess a few judges have read the law by swschrad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  2. Re:This sounds like a good precedent by silverkniveshotmail. · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Could it mean an end to RIAA extortion in the near future?
    Are you that hard up for karma?

    no, no, no, no. A judge saying that RIAA can't have the defendants hard drive does not mean that RIAA's crap is coming to a crashing halt.
  3. Re:This sounds like a good precedent by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 3, Insightful
    A judge saying that RIAA can't have the defendants hard drive does not mean that RIAA's crap is coming to a crashing halt.
    It pretty much does consider the RIAA will now have to prosecute the case on the facts. A remotely full hardrive with a defrag scheduled every week is all the plausable deniability you need.
    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
  4. Re:RIAA defence? by whoever57 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    if you can recover a file, you can usually recover the date of creation/deletion of the file.
    Can the RIAA show that the previous owner had the date correctly set on his/her computer?
    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  5. Re:This sounds like a good precedent by shmlco · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Didn't we just have the story about the moron who wipped and defragged his drive after it was requested for examination? And judged guilty?

    Want deniability? Just don't download the crap in the first place.

    --
    Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
  6. Re:Okay... by NewYorkCountryLawyer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
  7. Re:RIAA Defence? by MacWiz · · Score: 3, 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.