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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)"
The problem with this in the US is that the defendant has to understand that and bring it up in court. A green lawyer might easily be intimidated by some of the RIAA's paper work and anyone representing themselves is usually SOL on properly discrediting bad evidence, we tend to understand the theory, but not the procedure.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I'm not supporting the RIAA but this seems wrong to me. If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
It's more like, "You can only have the knives that you have a plausible reason to believe may have been used for that murder." Why should they get the defendant's son's knife, just because he lives 4 miles away from the defendant and vigorously asserts the defendant's innocence? They need a reason to search other people's property; they can't just conjure up a hypothesis out of thin air that the property was used to commit the crime, and use that as justification to examine it.
This is all about intimidation. The RIAA doesn't like the son for defending his mother so vigorously, so they're spitefully trying to fish for evidence on his computer, on the off-chance they might be able to drag him into a lawsuit. They have no probable cause to accuse the son of any wrongdoing, or to assert that the mother is committing infringement using his computer rather than her own, and the judge is perfectly correct in denying their motion.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
Just playing the devil's advocate... My Mum has an unlimited home DSL account... which she uses to send about 6 mails a month with. It would be perfect to add a router and Mac Mini with a bit torrent client running on it to her existing setup. She would never notice and I could occasionally FTP in and download the files obtained. Then if she ever got into one of these lawsuits I could remove the whole setup and she could honestly deny having anything to do with it.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
The RIAA has been breaking new ground with the legal branch of their customer service division. A large portion of the law is not in the laws that have been passed by legislatures, it is in previous decisions by the judicial system and is called case law.
Since the RIAA's new approach to customer service is, shall we say, innovative decisions in earlier cases can have a great effect on later cases. For example, in a previous RIAA story on Slashdot it was reported that when the RIAA draws a blank in discovery against a particular custo^H^H defendant, then they are liable for the defendants legal fees. This could be a serious blow to the RIAA's current shotgun approach.
Likewise, if this current ruling stands it could help establish limits on how far the RIAA can go poking their nose into other people's business. IMO, the RIAA (like SCO) has greatly abused the legal system to pursue their own selfish and greedy ends. It's great news that the legal system is responding and is putting in limits on how far the RIAA can go.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Even simpler. Bittorent-capable router. With web interface.
Watchers of the news from outside you country have a slightly different opinion ... exceptions are so easily made that groups of people a treated in an unfair way
Because the rare exception makes for more exciting news than the countless boring reasonably fair cases. It's the same reason why Americans think the rest of the world is constantly having some horrific natural disaster, fighting internal wars, or attending lavish film festivals.
In Australia they tried doing that for theft the idea was that if One family member is a crook they all are. The idea didn't get much support Could not even find someone stupid enuth to take it to parliament.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I think I'm a software engineer, and I don't even know what a PE stamp is.
I have a degree in Computer Science, and I have been a systems programmer designing and writing networking software for over 25 years, can I claim that I'm a software engineer?
So... what is a "PE stamp"?
What if you have three HDs, where HD #1 is your main drive, HD #2 is a decoy with, say, some old photos on it, and HD #3 is the P2P drive. (I run Linux, so keep up here.) You don't have anything listed in /etc/fstab about the partitions on the P2P drive, you mount that manually when you want to do some filesharing. It includes all the applications and data, so that nothing about filesharing appears on HD #1.
Now if you are asked to provide your HD, you make an image of HD #1. No evidence of filesharing there, assuming they figure out what ext3 is. That might be the end of it. But wait, they bring in an expert who actually understands the filesystem and says whoah! the logs say you were mounting some other partitions that don't appear in fstab. Oh, that's right, I sometimes mount HD #2 to fetch old pictures off it, here's an image of that.
It seems to me you'd really have to have your forensics hat on tight to figure out there was actually a third HD in the mix. Even if you did figure it out, think about how the legal proceedings would have gone: (1) We demand to see your HD, judge okays it, no evidence. (2) We "cracked" your scheme and demand to see HD #2, judge reluctantly okays it, no evidence. (3) This time we really cracked it and demand HD #3, judge says this is getting stupid, go screw yourself.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.