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RIAA Backs Down Again in Chicago
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA seems to have a problem making things stick in the Windy City. It has once again backed down in BMG v. Thao, after suing a misidentified defendant. Same thing occurred last October in Elektra v. Wilke. In the Thao case, the RIAA based its case on information that the cable modem used to partake in file sharing was registered to Mr. Thao. However, it turned out that Mr. Thao was not even a subscriber (pdf) of the ISP (pdf) at the time of the alleged file-sharing, and therefore did not have possession of the suspect cable modem at that time."
Realizing you are suing the wrong person is not 'backing down'.
Oh? Did you have a promising career all planned out just before this little mishap? Sorry about that. No blood, no foul, right? We're sure your home country will have some nice relief services for people who are down on their luck.
Have a nice day!
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
In most cases, if you read the briefs, the lawyers are clueless about the evidence presented, in almost ANY field, not just in tech. The verbage indicates ignorance in many many areas. In most cases though, the lawyer is more up to speed then is the judge. Think that one through and you will understand the ture pickle we are in...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The only way the RIAA is going to stop harassing people through the courts is when it costs them so much that they can't sustain it anymore. That won't happen simply by suing for court costs and attorney's fees -- the RIAA (through its members) is much too wealthy for that.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Yeah, lets see a newspaper pull that off. "But your honor one of our sources reported that Celebrity T was doing R bad thing at the time therefore we didn't slander them."
Guess what, if you sue someone it's now your problem. If the RIAA doesn't fully explore evidence before suing people over then they have no right to continue suing people. It would be like the police bringing a case against a suspected murderer and asking, in the trial, to search the house, car etc. to find evidence. That's not how the legal system is supposed to work. Trial is supposed to be the last thing in a long line of to do's, one of which is verifying that you've got the right person. The RIAA doesn't do that long list, which is horribly wrong but not quite illegal, and more and more often it's coming back to haunt them.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Exactly. My wife's best friend clerks for a federal judge and as part of her job writes decisions. It shocked the hell out of her to see that her work was not just used as a distilled reference for the judge's own decision but were read word-for-word and unedited in court the same day she wrote them without any review. It is frightening that a 20-something from a tier-3 law school is literally interpreting law with no oversight. So far she has decided computer, pharmaceutical and telecommunications cases with no experience in any of these fields. And according to this clerk it is common and accepted.
This mis-identified defendant issue is a bit worrying. I mean, let's say you're tracking information on a p2p network. Now, you write your own client, and sit there tracking what IP address sends you data from downloading a specific file(that is supposedly copyrighted). At that point, you have the data block(s), and can compare them against the final downloaded file, which you can verify with it's file hash. And you have the IP, and the date/time you got it from them.(Let's assume this is a p2p protocol where the client you get the data from is definitely the one that actually has the data purposely shared, and not one like say Freenet, where it's passed often by other clients)
:P(which would garner them insanely bad press, and make judges in courtrooms very, very angry with them)
Then you go to the ISP, and query who had that IP address at that time. For bonus points, you ask if they have any traffic logs that will verify the IP address was participating on the appropriate ports for that p2p network.
All that data seems enough to validly go to court. You still have to link a person successfully to the ip address, but the base level identification is enough to have a valid name to at least start with.
So the overwhelming question for me, is how they can get it so wrong? If this is the wrong person, and they are not even a subscriber to a comcast cable modem, how is their name in the RIAA's possession? I'm throwing out the wacky idea that they are suing via random selection in the phone book
Obviously you have to treat each case on it's own merits, and making assumptions about guilt/innocence is a dangerous thing indeed. Also, we are not counting the times when an adult is the target in court, but it turns out it's the child of the adult who is the infringing person. But still, these *completely* erroneous identifications are very worrying. Just who are the RIAA getting their information from?
Wikipedia has a comment about this:
Let's name the actual companies involved: Sony, Universal, Capitol, KGB Records, Synapse Films... We might even make up a new acronym for the coalition.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
On the ISP side, it is not their job to have forensic quality logs that can stand up as evidence in court. ISPs keep logs for their own internal purposes. So, to some extent, the data which ISPs are being required to provide via subpoena is being misused. I do not see any reason that the ISPs should have to keep data of sufficient quality to satisfy third party needs, particularly without being compensated for it. Having had to implement tamper and fraud and time change and dropped record and system failure and etc. resistant logging for a client, I can tell you it adds an order of magnitude of expense. This expense is of no benefit to the ISP.
When I was in the position of handling abuse reports in the past, I would not respond with user details unless absolutely forced to. Instead, the policy was that if someone reported a possible abuse of the TOS and provided their own logs sufficient to investigate, I would then perform an internal investigation, which might include beginning additional logging on the account if it seemed warranted. If a TOS violation was supportable, I would then notify the user and let them respond. In this case, the user would have said "WTF: I wasn't your customer at the time!" and I would have said: "OS! Computer error, my bad!" (if I had screwed up that badly in the first place). If they could not deny the TOS violation, I would terminate the account. If the TOS violation also involved possible illegal acts, I would then turn over my logs and notes to the appropriate authorities directly, with any necessary caveats; the authorities could do whatever they needed to do with the information. I would *not* turn over confidential information to the original reporter, whose identity and authority I could probably not validate anyway. They can get the information from the authorities if they are authorized to do so. Bottom line is, though, provide the data as is, say how it is gathered, and take no responsibility beyond that.
Basically someone reporting a violation would have two choices: go through the hoops and get action quickly, or get a supoena/court order and get action slowly. People went through the hoops. Luckily I did not have to deal with this long or often.
Think of it this way. We know the standard Slashdot opinion of politicians and lawyers. A judge is a lawyer that is more politically savvy than most. /shiver