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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)"
Yeah!!!
Now back to our normal post. The RIAA is like a bacteria that has multiplied to infect many hosts. However, like a simple bacteria that replicates perfect copies of itself, the RIAA lawsuits are all exact clones. What this means is that, if you can kill one of them, you can kill all of them. Reading the postings just this week on Ray's blog will tell you that the many enemies (a.k.a. innocent defendants who are fighting back) of the RIAA are coordinating and refining their tactics in search of the magic bullet that will kill this plague once and for all. And from the looks of things, they're getting mighty close.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not really, because the RIAA tactic has been to call everyone a murderer and then ask to search their premises for knives. We have laws against that sort of thing when the police want to do it, and we should have laws against that sort of thing when corporations want to do it.
Not allowing baseless evidence gathering is the same as not allowing baseless search. But casting a very wide net and calling everyone a thief, and then when asked to produce evidence, claiming that you'd have it if you could go searching for it - this is just simply not the way the American justice system works, for better or worse.
IANAL, but just because an armed robber lives in the same town as a relative, and they both have cars, and are close, doesn't mean there is need, or cause to search the relatives car for evidence of the crimes committed by the armed robber. Yes, I know that might not be the best analogy, but where is the judge to stop? Can the RIAA look at her neighbor's pc? Can the RIAA request that all her friends computers be searched? If there is no evidence of infringement, well, then there is no evidence. Going fishing in the computers that she might have had access to is just that, fishing.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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?
She "may have" had access to your computer. That doesn't mean that she did. Even if she did, that doesn't mean that she used it to commit the alleged offense.
It sounds to me like you just don't get it.
If your mother is accused of a crime, why in the hell should they be able to search your property, at a different house, without probable cause?
If the police can't do it for a murder case, why should the RIAA be able to do it for a civil suit?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You completely missed the point. If a crime has been committed by the son, then a new case with evidence must be brought against him. Since when do we, as Americans, allow witch hunts in order to save failing court cases? The only reason the RIAA is going after the son is because he is vigorously defending his mother and they want to put him back on his heels.
You're not making sense here. First off, you have to mean if the person they're suing has access and may have used his PC for copyright infringement, should his PC not be investigated? That's the first correction. They've already checked the PC in the house itself, and come up dry. It does not contain the hard drive with any of the infringing files or programs on it.
Secondly, they're not suing the son. So he is not the person they're suing, and they should have no right to anything on his PC just because he's a son who lives 4 miles away and, like any good son should, visits his mother.
Thirdly, if you have your own computer at home, it doesn't make much sense that you'd pack up your computer, drive miles to your Mother's house, and commit copyright infringement there, before packing up your computer once more and driving back home again to use your computer for everything else you normally use it for. Even if you have a notebook computer, do you drive somewhere else to do all your filesharing? That's too much of a reach for even this judge to accept, hence they're not allowed to just look at a non-party's computer hard drive because of a casual relationship between a mother and her son. There is no evidence that the son's computer has ever been in his Mother's house.
It would be like the RIAA saying that, we tracked filesharing to the IP address of your best friend who lives a few miles from you. But because we couldn't find the evidence on his computer, and we know you're friends who often got together at his house, and because you have a computer too, we want to give your computer a digital anal examination as well, hoping we'll find something to incriminate you with. And it's not even like said best friend told the RIAA to get his own butt out of the sling that, "Hey, my best friend always came over with his computer and we downloaded music on it." He would have told them nothing of the sort.
Now do you get it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Forgive my ignorance, but... can someone who's actually from the USA explain why the RIAA would get *anyone's* computer at all? Even if there is a reason why it should be inspected at all, shouldn't that be done by a (hopefully) neutral third party, like the police? It seems like a bad idea to me to give someone who's got a vested interest in finding evidence against you an opportunity to plant it.
butter the donkey
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!
That's the whole point of April Fool's day. To remind you to be skeptical.
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.
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
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
Posting anonymously....
In discussions with a real lawyer about all this, my lawyer friend and I came upon the solution...
Should you get The Letter, which has no legal value whatsoever, put a bullet through the drive, do a Jeff Merkey and bash it against a rock, melt it in a Sentry heat treating oven at 2250F (FUN!!). "We're sorry, but the drive no longer exists"
Should you get The Subpoena, it's too late and you're hosed. Bend over and take it or mount a real defense, because if you destroy the drive, it's spoilation of evidence and the court really frowns on that. That's what hosed Jeff Merkey when Novell subpoenaed him.
Timing is everything.
I'm not supporting the inquisition but this seems wrong to me. If the person being investigated is a woman and has a cat, then shouldn't we see if she floats?
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
--
BMO
Even simpler. Bittorent-capable router. With web interface.
Every time you buy an album or a movie through these big companies, your money will be used to sue you or your friends.
If you stop paying them they will fold with less collateral damage, and music will be free sooner.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
s/that far//
That oughta do it.
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
And iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them ...
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
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.
My former employer, a California aerospace outfit, ran into something like that around 1970 when it opened a good-sized operation in Denver. There was some bit of paperwork with the city and county that involved listing the number of engineers on the payroll, and the local PE association cried foul: local ordinances forbade representing someone as an "engineer" who didn't have a PE license.
We replied that we would be delighted to come into compliance, and would they please send over eight hundred license applications, a copy of the sample test, eight hundred PE Assn membership applications, and when would their next officer election be?
Last we ever heard from them.
rj