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RIAA Security Expert's Quest For Reliability
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In the ongoing case of UMG v. Lindor, Ms. Lindor has now moved to exclude the trial testimony of the RIAA's 'expert' witness, Dr. Doug Jacobson. Jacobson is the CTO and co-founder of Palisade Systems, Inc, and a teacher of internet security at Iowa State, but in his February 23rd deposition testimony she argues he failed to meet the reliability standards prescribed by Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Federal Rule of Evidence 702. The Groklaw and Slashdot communities participated in both the preparation of the deposition questions, and the vetting of the witness's responses."
Could T real FA please stand up?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I know how the RIAA can achieve reliability - it's easy, really. All they need to do is...
Wait, what am I doing? On second thought, they can kiss my skinny pasty-white nerd ass.
That it required two very large combined communities to refute this sham expert. Still, that makes me hopefuly that mechanisms like this might rescue part of our judicial system from the money game.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I think it's good to see not only someone continuing to fight back, but that we can make a difference as a technical community (hopefully).
/2cents
2cents I also think that the RIAA and everyone from them can fornicate themselves with an iron stick.
I can see the troll/flamebait mods coming already.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
What's so difficult to read? Different colors? Anyways, it basically says that some lawyers in new York are in an ongoing battle with the RIAA (via UMG) and a recent "expert" is being questioned on the grounds that they did not meet a certain standard to an expert witnesses, set forth by case precidence. It also states that Slashdot and Groklaw participated in formulating questions asked of the 'expert' as well as analysis of it's response.
Demented But Determined.
Is this good, bad, or other?
Other. I'm the guy with the gun.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Am I the only one who does NOT despise Jacobson? I thought he held up fairly well in that deposition under the pressure of some of Mr. Beckerman's more irrelevant questions - for example, the ones targetting his vocabulary, or the ones about why he didn't produce imaginary documentation detailing an absense of evidence.
There are plenty of weak points in the RIAA's case as a whole. One could attack the chain of identity leading to the defendent - is the infringing activity traced to the correct IP, and is the IP at that time actually the one that belonged to Ms. Lindor, and can we be reasonably sure the activity took place on her computer, and we don't even know that she was the one at the computer so would she even be liable... The chain of identity is probably the best weak point in their case, but you could also argue that the damages are negligable and fight the absurd statutory fee, or that perhaps no uploading took place and the torrent was all seeded one way.
There are a number of legitimate arguments to be made, but the point I'm getting at is I don't see how the deposition of Jacobson attacked any of them sufficiently to prove or disprove his competence as an expert witness. Slashdot was quick to point out the minor screw-ups in his testimony, but many of those statements were perfectly fine in the context of explaining the technology to a layperson. Some of the "holes" in his argument were so unlikely that I would not even consider them reasonable doubt in a criminal case. Do you really think someone actually decided to frame the woman by filesharing wirelessly and changing her MAC address and internal NAT mappings to mask the presence of a wireless router? I don't.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Since you obviously have evidence for your well-considered conclusion, I don't see why you don't give the RIAA a call and offer your services. I suspect they'll be looking for someone pretty soon.
It's still very much news for nerds, stuff the matters. The the RIAA cases deal with an activity that many of us have participated in the past, present or future, and regardless of your opinion of the state of copyright law. It's important to know how one might respond if served.
More importantly though, these cases indirectly impact many other activities, many of which I think the great majority of the community feels are not unethical, which involve limits of copyrights, security, DRM, etc.
And speaking as somebody who's a US citizen who knows a fair amount as an amateur about the law and constitution as written documents, these cases, as well as the SCO entries, are certainly educating me greatly about how the law is actually practiced outside of my personal reading of it. Routine trial motions are relevant when they deal with something that is important to track, especially when most of the community doesn't know what's a routine motion and what isn't. I personally hope that at the very least everybody from the US learns from these, since being able to describe with accuracy and detail the problems we have with the current state of the laws is the only way that all the letters, e-mails etc to legislators are going to have any measurable impact.
If this court makes this ruling (and while IANAL, I would grant this motion!), could this be grounds for challanging all future MAFIAA supenas?
1.Yes.
2. Yes.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
By his own admission Dr. Jacobson fails on every count.
We all know there are huge holes in analyzing the evidence. Ms. Lindor can not call an expert to dispute Dr. Jacobson's testimony because his methodology has not been published. it has not been subject to peer review. There has been no formal analysis of the reliability. And his methods have not gained enough acceptance for anyone else to be familiar with them. If Ms. Lindor can not call her own witness she is denied due process. The RIAA may as well just use voodoo science.
If Dr. Jacobson's methodology had been subject to peer review, there would be peer-reviewed articles analyzing the details brought up in the deposition such as IP spoofing, malware, the Kazaa protocol, and MediaSentry.
The motion to exclude brings up a couple other huge problems with Dr. Jacobson's testimony. It's not that Dr. Jacobson is a bad guy or that he is somehow incompetent. The problem is that Dr. Jacobson can not draw any 'expert' conclusions in the legal sense. NewYorkCountryLawyer always puts the word 'expert' in quotes when he mentions Dr. Jacobson. I think that's because Dr. Jacobson is not legally an expert.
Your comment makes no sense. He was not "supposed to investigate" anything; he was "supposed to" testify about the investigation that was done three (3) years earlier.
As to whether he was "out of his area", he probably was... but that's not my fault, that's his, for pretending to be something he's not, and it's the RIAA's, for inducing the man to pretend to be something he's not. While I may have been asking him things he couldn't answer, they were not irrelevant to his report and his proffered testimony; they were directly relevant to what he falsely claimed.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that your knowledge of law is quite limited. There is no "prosecution"; this is a civil case. There is no concept of "reasonable doubt" in a civil case.
Yes his testimony is helpful to defendant. But this is not a game; this is a federal trial where one side is suing someone for tens of thousands of dollars. Under clear standards of law his testimony is inadmissible and must be excluded. I would be a pretty dumb lawyer if I allowed the RIAA to bring this guy anywhere near a courtroom.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This was the first time in 25,000 cases that the RIAA's expert was deposed.
The RIAA says he is their only witness to copyright infringement.
They used the same expert in all the cases.
And it turns out his testimony would be inadmissible at trial.
I think that's pretty important and not at all "routine".
In fact in 32 1/2 years of working in the litigation field, I've never even heard of anything quite like this.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
His report states the following:
He can't do that. It's impossible. there is no way he can use those materials to prove that a computer owned by the defendant was used. Throughout his deposition he gives misleading and weasly answers. "I'll show the defendant's computer was used", yet he cannot and in fact found no evidence on her hard drive. He's getting paid by the RIAA, but his duty as an expert is to give his accurate interpretation of the evidence. We've all seen on TV (and in the SCO vs. IBM litigation) that some experts will say anything for money. This appears to be another case of that. He not only makes "technical" mistakes in attempting to describe it to a layperson, he makes glaring errors and omissions to further his client's case.
His report has this error shortly after his credentials:
He doesn't mention NAT or proxy servers at all. There can actually be many computers sharing a single public IP address. NAT (Network Address Translation) is when one computer or device separates two networks. On one side of the device, computers can have different addresses. When they want to communicate to the other side of the device, they use the device as a gateway. The NAT device then uses it's own IP address on the other side. There can be many computers on the "internal" side, but they all look the same to computers or devices on the other side of the NAT device. Imagine you live in a house with two friends, Joe and Moe. Joe gets a subscription to Scientific American and Moe gets a subscription to Playboy, but they only fill out the address. When the mail comes, you give Joe the Scientific American and Moe the Playboy because you know they requested them. The magazines only know someone at your address has a subscription. Even though there are three people living at that address, the magazines can't tell.
Proxy servers can also be used to mask the final destination. Think of it almost as a post-office box. Many people can rent PO boxes from one address. They come to that address to get their mail, then they take it home to their personal address. The place with the PO Boxes might not even have your personal address, like a proxy server might not store logs. This is especially the case when someone with nefarious intent got you to install something on your computer without your knowledge to make it act as a proxy s
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it before. It is indeed a part of my training to produce citations to authority for what I am saying. (And I don't understand objecting to that : (a) those who want to read further click the link; (b) those who don't, don't.)
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Do you actually spend time to check that foe list periodically to see if it has new additions? I think you need a healthier hobby, like making hats out of tin foil or posting skeptical comments to stories about the moon landing.
For someone who professes to be an advocate of civilized discourse, your choice of terminology was odd, to say the least. Of course you're not the type to apologize for it.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful