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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."
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?
"Okay, you guys can have the music back. Just let me keep the pr0n!"
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I'll stick the RIAA with something hard....
1) Buy/Pay-off "neutral expert"
2) Resume "business" as normal
3) ???
4) Profit!
So, does this shift things back to a higher level of probable cause now? Or is that even relevant in a civil case such as this?
Libertas in infinitum
...is that you pr0n collection is potentially safe from scrutiny. Can you just imagine if those RIAA people could tell the media how music pirating and pornaholics go hand in hand?
As a a mutually agreeable, neutral computer forensics expert, my only acceptable choice is CowboyNeal.
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
It just means that a court has ruled the plaintiff can't be the one examining the defendant's hard drive. Why it took so long for a judge to decide the one filing complaint isn't exactly a neutral party... maybe this is the first time someone has complained.
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.
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.
With the constant erosion of privacy laws, this is indeed refreshing.
:)
I'm looking forward to the rootkit jokes.
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!
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?
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).
/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.
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
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
I checked the court's order here and it looks like Rule 26(c) was invoked, oddly by the plaintiff RIAA. Apparently the defendant refused to produce her hard drive and the RIAA claimed that a mirror image of it was necessary, and that any privacy concerns could be dealt with under a Rule 26(c) protective order. Normally, a plaintiff makes a motion under Rule 26(c), so this looks a tad unusual to me but it works. The judge did not explicitly rely on Rule 26(c) in making his order, but everything about the order says it's a Rule 26(c) order.
... may make any order which justice requires to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense, including ... that the disclosure or discovery may be had only on specified terms and conditions ...; that the discovery may be had only by a method of discovery other than that selected by the party seeking discovery; that certain matters not be inquired into, or that the scope of the disclosure or discovery be limited to certain matters; [or] that discovery be conducted with no one present except persons designated by the court[.]" See the text of Rule 26 for more.
:)
Rule 26(c) provides that, when certain prerequisites are met, "the court
Long story short - like I said, the court is just applying the rules and common sense. The RIAA is going to kick and scream about it, but there's nothing out of the ordinary about what just happened.
If they ever try to nail me (not that they'd have a reason to), I'll make sure that my linux box is only examined by a well-trained MCSE with lots of experience with the ntfs and fat32 filesystems.
In reality, I could always do a checksum of my partitions, and see what the checksum is when the drive gets back from the RIAA's expert evidence installer guy. I'd fear a real expert more that I'd fear the RIAA shill doing it.
Who does this really side with? The RIAA or the individual? Does it not give more concrete evidence against that individual if files are found by a 3rd party? You would think any files 'found' by the RIAA would not hold up well in court. What about files that were deleted long ago, how about used HDDs that have previous owners files on them? Sounds like the RIAA would have to request files from very specific dates and times to me.
May the Maths Be with you!
It coul mean the RIAA can have only the information relevant to their lawsuit.
I wonder if that means they have to basically play "Go Fish" now.
Sony: "Do you have any Christina Aguilera?"
Neutral guy: "Go Fish!"
Stipulation #1: They must listen to EVERY SONG IN ITS ENTIRETY to make sure its not a legal demo copy with that damned message at random points. Stipulation #2: They must preview EVERY MEDIA FILE (Including horse porn) IN ITS ENTIRETY to insure that there is no copyright infringement there such as music videos or demo images. Stipulation #3: They must reference EVERY SONG 'illegally obtained' with a list of music legally owned by all users, past and present, of the hard drive, including the manufacturers and the techies at Dell. Oh, and the company charges at least $120/hour for the service... hope they like to spend their money on guys watching horse porn.
First post = troll. Cleverly worded post designed to enrage others = flamebait.
Now that this ruling has occurred, and has been made available publicly, most defendants who are represented by lawyers won't be handing anything over without a similar protective order.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
When the Empire wins the LUCRETIVE CASH SETTLEMENTS from these actions, how do they disperse them to the artists?
Do they toss the money into a general bonus slush fund meated out in infinitessimal slicettes to each artist their various members represent? Like, does Michael Jackson get 0.0001 cents for every suit settled?
Or, conversely, do they pass the money on directly to the artists whose songs are found to have been shared? In this scenario they would audit a defendant's hard-drive, find lots of Madonna songs, and then give Madonna her share of the bounty.
If so, they should be making available these backdoor sales for the purposes of inclusion in music charts. Like the Pirate Top 10.
(I know, I know -- some folk'll cry foul and claim that that sort of thing would only encourage illegal filesharing 'cause the cool kids are doing it, but those people should take their beef up with Sweden, first.)
From this point of view the lawsuits could be seen as friendly, random audits to pay for shared songs. If the artists were compensated in direct relation to illicitly shared tracks found, it becomes a kind of sale. Totally legit -- like a kind of anti-lottery.
Then the government could tax it and we could all get on with our business.
These stories are free but worth money.
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.
1. I commend you on reading the documents. That's impressive.
2. They accused her, in boilerplate, of downloading, distributing, and/or making available for distribution.
3. In fact all they had is a screenshot indicating that somebody using that dynamic IP address had a shared files folder, which the RIAA considers 'making available for distribution' or 'distributing'.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
There are probably references galore to those files' existence on your sys drive. Do you run a media player from your sys drive? Do you run a p2p app from your sys drive? If on MS Windows, do you browse to your media files using Windows Explorer? All of these activities will leave a history trail as evidence of a media file's existence.
It would actually be pretty difficult to run a system that used media files but accumulated no traces of them. Every app that touches media in any way would need to be run in portable mode, and those apps themselves would need to be launched in a way that didn't generate any MRU entries.
Pi Ran Out
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
-.no
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
Did somebody steal something?
XML causes global warming.