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RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The online community now has an opportunity to see the fruits of its labor. Back in December, the Slashdot ('What Questions Would You Ask an RIAA Expert?') and Groklaw ('Another Lawyer Would Like to Pick Your Brain, Please') communities were asked for their input on possible questions to pose to the RIAA's 'expert'. Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, was scheduled to be deposed in February in UMG v. Lindor, for the first time in any RIAA case. Ms. Lindor's lawyers were flooded with about 1400 responses. The deposition of Dr. Jacobson went forward on February 23, 2007, and the transcript is now available online (pdf) (ascii). Ray Beckerman, one of Ms. Lindor's attorneys, had this comment: 'We are deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers' responses. Now I ask the tech community to review this all-important transcript, and bear witness to the shoddy investigation and junk science upon which the RIAA has based its litigation war against the people. The computer scientists among you will be astounded that the RIAA has been permitted to burden our court system with cases based upon such arrant and careless nonsense.'"
Respect to you Ray.
I've seen you take a lot of flack for your efforts to keep us all abreast of the proceedings, of issues that should concern us all.
And it's nice to see that the community could have been of help.
All the best.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Because he is not a professional engineer, there is nothing really keeping him from being a talking head in court. On the witness stand, he could be totally honest and forthcoming, or he could totally sell out the the RIAA and say whatever they wanted him to say. The only thing at stake is his reputation, if he is later discredited. However, a professional engineer would lose their license if they were shown to have acted fraudulently or negligently, and thus their career, profession, and ability to make a living.
It's fine to give a professor the benefit of the doubt when you attend his/her lecture. Doing so in a courtroom seems an act of extreme naivety.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Way off-topic, but programming desperately needs the kind of accountability and professionalism that 'real' engineering has. We're around where engineering was 100 years ago just now, with a hundred different screw threads and steam engines which explode in your face. 'software engineering' may be an academic discipline, but 'professional' (in their execution) software engineers are few and far between and professionally engineered software is rarer still. The lawyer is making a valid point.
Before you ask, I am a professional (it's my job) programmer. I'd love to be an engineer. I'd love to work somewhere where those kind of standards were applied. I'd get a CS degree (mine is in Physics), but those programmers I've worked with who have CS degrees don't seem much more engineer-like in their application than those without. Too much hacking, not enough engineering. Perhaps civil engineers would be the same if every bridge had "this bridge comes with no warranty, either express or implied" written into the contract.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
As far as licensing, one of the turning points happened when a school in Texas blew up as a result of faulty engineering. Public outcry caused them to pass the strictest engineering accountability standards in the nation. (IANAL - if you are are not an NSPE licensed engineer, but your business card calls you an engineer, and you happen to be passing through Texas, DO NOT put your business card in any of those put-your-business-card-in-here-to-win-something fishbowls. I've been told people have been prosecuted for this under the licensing laws)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
What is more important and shocking is the unprofessionalism of his vodoo science.
If this witness (a) lacked appropriate professional credentials, (b) lacked appropriate expert witness credentials, and (c) had a major conflict of interest, but nevertheless had a convincing and reliable scientific basis for his conclusions, then he would present a formidable obstacle.
As it turns out, his "method" -- if you want to call it that -- will be laughed out of any courtroom.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
The RIAA lobbyists have been a busy lot. On Friday, they got the Copyright Review Board to grant them a fee based system that will essentially shut down the majority of small Internet Radio stations. Way to go boys. Bring on that corporate commercial media. http://www.radioparadise.com/ http://www.save-internet-radio.com/2007/03/02/save -internet-radio/
I'll go you even one better, they don't even know if the index of song files in the screen shot was on one computer, or represented bits and pieces from a number of different computers (nodes, in KaZaA parlance).
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
After reading that all I can see if the guy evading the question, flat out denying truths, agreeing with them in limited fashions, constantly playing dumb. His investigation methods are borderline incompetent, after reading that huge PDF I could only say he should not be allowed to be a whitness in any case I mean I'm a third year computer engineering student most of my course emphasis has been on networking and hardware rather than this sort of thing but I can see huge holes in his logic.
1.Doesn't verify his sources Beckermans point about "are mediasomethigns and verizons clock synchronised" is a good one espeacially when you consider his point about the nature of IP address's, at the very least he should have requested the lease time of that IP (so when did the subscriber start using the IP and for how long) to verify that the information had a chance of being correct.
2.No set method, the lack of reports and the fact he never made print outs suggests he doesn't have a set method of investigating, which personnally would make me question his investigation techniques this results in a whole list of problems:
2a.means no evidence supporting the defendent was kept, in effect his not impartial and also hurts the defense 2b.suggests he makes it up as he goes along, a "what seems a good idea at the time", as you can clearly see he's missed out on some issues which are important, like confirming the MAC address of the machine and its method of connecting to the internet.
3.Deliberate attempts to twist what hes saying or not sticking to the question an example would be towards the end where he starts talking about IPV4 and finishs with IPV6. I don't know how either works exactly but he should have talked about both seperatly, the use of both at once means he could be dilibertly hiding stuff, when was IPV6 rolled out anyways? Anouther example would be his linking IP address's directly to a PC, no matter how many times Beckerman tried to get him to admit that when accessed through a router the IP address given to the outside world is the routers not the individual PC's. 4.Lack of actual investigation, now I'm not sure what he was exactly hired to do but by the looks of it RIAA hired him to prove and be a whitness to say that a person used Kaza to download and share music. Hes not done that, hes investigated the drive he was sent found no traces of Kaza on it, or any MP3's (I think he indirectly said this) rather than investigate possible explanations for this, for example did the person own two pc's, did they connect to the internet through a router, could this router have been compromised (perhaps unsecured), perhaps then look for security vulnerabilities to see if it was a zombie machine, or for other security problems. Then if he couldn't prove any of that attempt to verify that mediashares information was correct, check it and check verizons and then attempt to co-oberate that information somehow, for example attempt to obtain the MAC address from the hard drive and from mediashares packet information in otherwords to link them up. Otherwise all he can actually claim is that "The pc in question when inspected did not have the Kazaa program on it at any time, nor does it appeared to have or have had the media files that mediasomething accuse the computer of having" His conclusions from his investigation lack any form of imparitality and it appears that he was unwilling to give any real unbiased opinion.
personnaly after reading that disposition I would seriously call into credibility as a expert or even as a whitness. I'm sure better people than I could take apart his disposition its 3am here I'm tired but those are the things that come to my mind at least
A few unhelpful observations.
This is my first real-life encounter with a deposition, and I've gotta say it's quite fascinating. I like how the opposing lawyer relentlessly objects to nearly every single question. And how Mr. Beckerman's first goal seems to be to show that the "expert" has a financial interest in what he's been claiming, coupled with that expert's bizarre claims that he doesn't have the foggiest idea about the commercial reality surrounding his work. For example:
I'm not sure how you can have "no idea" whether the RIAA is pleased, furious, or otherwise about the fact that your company is creating anti-P2P products, while being simultaneously "sure" that your company is referring to the RIAA in its press releases to help sell its products.
This is funny, too:
I should buy some cement.
You are exactly right on that. There are certain standards. And he satisfied exactly none of them.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
He tried very hard not to say that it is always true because it isn't. That is why the lawyer (who clearly doesn't understand internetworking, but had a list of "gothchas") couldn't pin him down to anything.
While you may be right that the alledged KaZaa packets would support that idea, the main problem is that the RIAA expert has *no* way to verify any of his claims.
-He failed to document his forensics- which he believes is not necessary and any other professional would consider "OK". (Riiiight).
-He claims to be an expert on MediaSentry, but doesn't know enough about the program to discuss about potential bugs, the way it works, whether or not it has the ability to be wrong, etc.
-He tries to claim that the evidence proves his case, admits any screenshot can be manipulated, and proceeds to describe how it proves it.
-He admits the forensics, on the entire drive, found *nothing* that would suggest that there were illicit files, much less KaZaa.
-He admits that there was no verification that what Verizon produced was true.
His testimony is full of holes...
I've seen Kazaa mess up our DSL connection quite a few times. Now, did we use Kazaa? Nope. (we prefered WinMX and irc, but thats beside the point :-D).
When a user gets on Kazaa, the Kazaa network perpetuates that External IP address through their network. Your external_IP is linked to your kazaa_username. Now, when people search and get your kazaa_username, they hit that IP address. All is fine and good... until you are knocked off of DSL or your dhcp timer is up.
Then, you reconnect using a new external_IP. Now, you have many users on Kazaa that know your username goes to either your old IP or your new IP.
The network trashing occurs to the person who inhabits your OLD external_IP. You see a LOT of bandwidth from users and Kazaa network towards your new IP address. We had a 768/384 Kb connection, and 200 Kb was ate up with garbage from Kazaa from the previous IP inhabitor. This number of garbage connections approaches 0Kb, but never meets it.
Perhaps they detected a residual connection like that.
As to the economics side of the discussion: Most of the litigation settlements are $4500. Some people don't have the money. Some people are completely innocent. Almost no one can afford what it costs to defend a case brought by the RIAA, because the RIAA handles the cases in a way calculated to maximize the costs.
As to the human side, my guess is that a person like you -- who is probably on the high end of being able to weather something like this -- would find it pretty major. If you were totally innocent of copyright infringement which would you rather do -- pay $4500 in extortion money, or pay a fortune in legal fees to vindicate yourself. My guess is that either of those would leave you pretty unhappy. There are many, many people who are totally distraught over being put in these positions, and having to make impossible choices: (a) pay money I can't afford for something I didn't do; (b) turn in my child so they can sue him or her; (c) turn in my nephew or a neighbor's kid, so he can be sued; (d) incur an open-ended expense fighting the case; (e) file bankruptcy, even though it's for a "debt" I don't owe.
Also many people are afraid they or their children are going to jail.
And none of the settlements are true settlements: they require an admission of guilt; they leave you open to further lawsuits; and they require you, for the rest of your natural life, to refrain from doing many things which are NOT copyright infringements.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful