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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?
    1. Re:woo, guess a few judges have read the law by owlicks58 · · Score: 5, Informative

      This isn't a matter of legal debate, it's simply compliance with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In order to compel the defendant to produce the hard drive, the plaintiff (Sony) had to show that the information contained therein is relevant (under FRCP 26(a)). In this case it certainly was, as the court stated. The defendant brought up some legitimate concerns about privacy of documents not in dispute on the hard drive, and the judge agreed that to allow a mirror of the hard drive by Sony would be overly broad. This strikes a fine compromise between the concerns of both sides.

      --
      -Alex
  2. Defendant's terms by Firehed · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Okay, you guys can have the music back. Just let me keep the pr0n!"

    --
    How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  3. An Easy Win Here Would Be... by punxking · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  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

  5. Actual Rule by ari_j · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Rule 26(c) provides that, when certain prerequisites are met, "the court ... 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.

    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. :)

  6. definition of expert: by jtwronski · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.