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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."

7 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. My suggestion... by chill · · Score: 3, Interesting

    An open-source program along the lines of "file" that can identify file types. It can scan the drive and output and matches to music files. Those are the only files they get access to at all. No documents, pictures, movies, programs or anything else.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  2. RIAA defence? by whoever57 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here is a thought:
    Always buy used drives: never new.

    Then, if one has to surrender a drive for discovery, point out that deleted files could have been created and deleted by the prior owner of the drive.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  3. Only because it's costs them real money up front by Alcimedes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Up until now the RIAA has been living off of lawyers who are working off of retainers. Now that they'll have to shell out a grand or so to "inspect" someone's hard drive for stolen works it should get interesting. How eager will they be to charge 100 people if each one is going to run them $1,000 up front?

  4. They don't need to use the courts... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When a certain **AA which deals with movies sued me, they wanted access to my server and all of my computers. I gave in to the server bit, under supervision - I was innocent after all - but didn't let them touch my home machines (again, I am innocent and these requested searches were prior to going to court).

    What they did instead was hack my HTTP daemon, FTP daemon or some Windows vunlerability on my one Windows machine (HTTP and FTP installs both admittedly being out of date), install some server scripts to download / edit / see my files, and eventually use those scripts to install a rootkit or trojan on the machine. If they hadn't done that last step, I may have never noticed. After looking at my web server's access logs, they were certainly poking around in places that they had no business being in. I mean, apart from poking around in the first place... but I don't think files with names like 'bank.txt' and the like are any of their business.

    How do I know it was the **AA? The investigator they had who scp'd my entire /home and /var/log from my server under the guise of investigation had the same IP as in those access logs. I'm baffled at why he didn't even attempt to cloak it.

    I don't see the RIAA stepping down with this court decision. If this guy primarily uses Windows, they can just do what was done to me. And if they don't find anything, they can surely plant it.

    (posting AC becuase the lawsuit is still in the works) - captcha: sneakier

    1. Re:They don't need to use the courts... by artifex2004 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I hope you countersued. Sounds like they were contaminating evidence and also possibly stealing computer resources if they ran anything themselves. The last is probably a crime, not just a civil matter.

  5. Re:This sounds like a good precedent by shmlco · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And no, it's not flamebait, it's the truth. Want cheap music? Buy used CDs from the local record store or half.com for pennies on the dollar, and toss the disc into a box in the garage.

    It's cheap, legal, and if you get accused just bring in the box and dump it on their desk...

    --
    Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
  6. linux firewall question by jt418-93 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    so i had a though. say i have a linux firewall box that sees the world, all my windows boxes are safely behind it. if they request the computer attached to the ip, would that not be my linux box, with nothing but the firewall on it?

    just a question

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    -.no