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RIAA Can't Have Defendant's Son's Desktop
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's attempt to get Ms. Lindor's son's desktop computer in UMG v. Lindor has been rejected by the Magistrate Judge. The judge said that the RIAA 'offered little more than speculation to support their request for an inspection of Mr. Raymond's desktop computer, based on ... his family relationship to the defendant, the proximity of his house to the defendant's house, and his determined defense of his mother in this case. That is not enough. On the record before me, plaintiffs have provided scant basis to authorize an inspection of Mr. Raymond's desktop computer.' Decision by Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy. (pdf)"
*Plaintiffs may not have access to the defendant's hard drive; the hard drive must be turned over to a mutually acceptable neutral computer forensics expert; and his report must be done at the RIAA's expense. (SONY v. Arellanes)
they can't
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Please note that the following artist's revenue is helping to fund this action by UMG and the RIAA:
Amy Winehouse
Bon Jovi
Charlatans
Counting Crows
Limp Bizkit
Live
Ocean Color Scene
Puddle of Mudd
Sonic Youth
Texas
The Who
By buying anything from these or any other UMG artist, you are helping to fund these lawsuits. Please stop!
A brief history of the case was that the plaintiff (RIAA) demanded that the defendant turn over her computer to their experts for analysis. The defendant objected and would only agree to a third party copying the hard drive and handing the copy over to the plaintiff. The judge ruled in the defendant's favor and the HD was copied. However upon further analysis, it appears that HD had no traces of any filesharing software or the copyrighted songs that the plaintiff claimed were being shared. So the plaintiff went back to the judge saying, "Well, the defendant's son had access to her house, maybe it was his personal computer that the culprit." I suspect that the MediaSentry methods of identifying infringers are error prone and that is the most likely cause of the discrepancy. What the judge has ruled is that besides just speculation, the plaintiffs have offered no compelling evidence to search the computer of the defendant's son who has his own machine in his house and does not live with his mother. Although the decision doesn't mention it, the defendant's son claimed that his files are protected by attorney client privilege (as he is a lawyer and uses his computer for work). There has to be very compelling reasons for the plaintiff to over come that objection.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The RIAA action is a civil tort case -- not a criminal case. In civil cases in the US both sides are essentially required to turn over all relevant evidence to each other, and then they argue in court which one has the better evidence for their side (preponderance). This is the same type of case that IBM vs SCO is undergoing, and is two private parties.
In criminal cases, the state is the prosecutor (not plaintiff), and jail time may attach. You need a unanimous jury rather than a majority decision. RIAA cannot initiate a criminal case other than to make a complaint to the local police.
"For as long as you have had "grand juries"."
But this isn't about a crime. It's about a tort. No grand jury involved.
Please learn the difference.
One of the reasons why the RIAA isn't asking for criminal charges is that the evidence they have is so slim that even thinking about filing criminal charges, which require a _much_ higher burden of proof, is idiotic.
The RIAA is on pretty thin ice. Their "expert" claims to be a "software engineer" yet when asked if he's got a PE stamp, he says...well...no. Yet another wannabe expert.
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BMO
Actually, the big thing that emerged in discovery is that they hadn't done any real police work.
All they had was one expert witness who wrote three statements, all of them questionable on a number of grounds, based on a ten minute examination of a hard drive and additional examination of IP records generated by software that has dubious reliability and a statement from Verizon about an IP address that could easily have been wrong in several different ways.
That's one of the big reasons this case is crumbling and, from all appearances, taking a lot of RIAA cases with it.
The truth is that this was never about good "police" work. It was about intimidation; about identifying people who could be easily intimidated and railroading them with a blizzard of impressive looking paperwork; about using their settlements to intimidate others into not accessing online audio files, even when it was perfectly legal to do so. The intimidation worked (and continues to work to some extent) because the legal costs of fighting this RIAA paperwork were much higher than the price of a settlement.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Watch, in fascination, as the RIAA "expert" in the Lindor case is eviscerated....
0 73736822
...less than unassailable.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070302
This is why the RIAA wants to go on a fishing expedition. They have no case, and what they have is
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BMO
And ya know what?
That's a defense that your mom's lawyer can use. Indeed, having an insecure POS computer infected with malware, a wide open wireless router, IP addresses being spoofed, etc, yadda yadda yadda, were all used to pull Dr. Jacobson's deposition into a million little pieces in this case.
In other words, there is _no way_, using the RIAA's methods, to definitively trace music files to the specific computer, not after reading Dr. Jacobson's testimony. Read it. The URL is in one of my earlier postings.
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BMO
For a complete list of the bands financing this terrorism, please see the following URLs:
:D
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=1
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=2
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=3
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=4
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=5
Who knows - there might actually be someone you lot actually like in there
Why the hostility? Attaining a PE in any discipline requires documented proof of real world experience. Whether it gets rubber stamped by "some incompetent civil servant" doesn't matter.
For one, it shows a level of accountability when an engineer stamps a drawing. This is important when dealing with real world structures and systems that the general public's welfare depends on (i.e. life safety). Would you want it less stringent?
Whether it's worth much or not, much less exists right now in the world of software "engineering".
You are exactly right about that. At least one judge has held that they cannot have access even to the defendant's hard drive, that it must be done by a neutral third party. SONY v. Arellanes.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Incorrect. In this case the defendant turned over her complete hard drive. When the RIAA could find nothing on it to support their case, then they started pursuing her relatives. That's the way they operate.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
They don't. The screenshots that that are referring to are screenshots of Media Sentry's computers. They search the various P2P networks and when they "find" a PC that is sharing what they "believe" to be music, they take a screenshot of the P2P search page on their computer. The screenshot gives the name of the file and the ip address of the hosting computer. It may also give a hash for the file, but I am unsure about that. From what I've read, it doesn't seem like they actually download the file to verify that it really is the music file in question.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
(PS They don't. They get a screenshot of shared files, which could be on one computer or spread out over a whole group of computers called nodes and super nodes.).
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
It stands for Professional Engineer, a kind of licensing process demonstrating knowledge and competence to practice one's profession. They're mostly relevant for civil engineering (i.e., people whose screw-ups end up on the news as "major bridge collapses, 300 dead or missing"). PE also exists for mechanical and electrical engineers, but isn't uniformly required, as far as I know. I've never even heard of PE for anything software related, though some people have argued in favor of such a requirement.
In some locales, you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" unless you have a PE to your name, much like you can't start working as a doctor or lawyer without appropriate paperwork.
You are correct. The original Architect's drawing was almost impossible to build. (Architects don't get much respect from engineers either, at least where I went to school. They're viewed more as artists than engineers, with all the negatives that entails. Architects frequently support those views by proposing impossible to build designs that merely look pretty).
The rod was supposed to thread through 2 walkways in one piece, so each walkway's brackets would only support 1 walkway's weight. The contractor split the rod, causing the upper walkway's bracket to take on the full load of both walkways. Even so, it might have held due to factors of safety usually being quite conservative in construction, but with the opening ceremony, the walkways were heavily crowded with viewers watching the ceremony below, and the brackets on the upper walkway gave way dropping both walkways to the ground.
And therein lies another reason to not get a PE. They're your drawings, and you're liable, even if someone changes them to be realistically able to build them. (A junior engineer I believe approved the change btw, or did the change, it's been way too long ago) Either way, this incident finished more than one career.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You missed my point entirely. Yes, we can accomplish feats of engineering the Romans could only dream about (lack of materials and computer models are merely two reasons) But will our feats last 2000 years and be serviceable? I doubt it.
The ability of an individual to recall and apply engineering principals on an examination only proves that an individual can take an examination. Even 8 hours is no where near enough time to do anything in depth. I regularly had single problems for homework that took more than 8 hours each to solve, and that would only prove I knew how to solve a single problem. Covering multiple topics on an 8 hour exam is proving nothing more than literate knowledge of the topic. That's why PEs require 5 years of experience and a sponsor.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.