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Prof. Johan Pouwelse To Take On RIAA Expert

Posted by kdawson on from the knows-whereof-he-speaks dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Marie Lindor has retained an expert witness of her own to fight the RIAA, and to debunk the testimony and reports of the RIAA's 'expert' Dr. Doug Jacobson, whose reliability has been challenged by Ms. Lindor in her Brooklyn federal court case, UMG v. Lindor. Ms. Lindor's expert is none other than Prof. Johan Pouwelse, Chairman of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology. It was Prof. Pouwelse's scathing analysis of the RIAA's MediaSentry 'investigations' (PDF) in a case in the Netherlands that caused the courts in that country to direct the ISPs there not to turn over their subscribers' information (PDF), thus nipping in the bud the RIAA's intended litigation juggernaut in that country."

3 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. It'll be interesting to see.. by malkavian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Whether or not the RIAA manage to drown out the technical side of the argument in legal noise.
    I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that this is actually the candle in the darkness that the article author believes to be the case (and no, to those that'll accuse me of being a thief of property and a subversive, I don't download music or videos. I just think the **AA are just playing dictator, and now facing their just come uppance).

  2. I beg to disagree with a couple of your points by zappepcs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As soon as congress passes the magical and majestic Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007.

    1. Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright.
    2. Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Step number two would criminalize approximately 50% of the current Windows users. This move would seriously hamper MS's future revenues and cannot be allowed.

    3. Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations.
    4. Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention regulations. I'm assuming that you have heard, Viacom is going to have the DMCA repealed during their lawsuit with YouTube?

    5. Add penalties for "intended" copyright crimes.
    and my favorite,
    6. Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America.

    http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719339-7.html I'm reasonably certain that if the DHS were to use their position/power to spy on the **AA all of these law suits would simply vanish. I'm thinking that one DHS director finding out how much less of a cut he got than senator so-and-so would put paid to that game.
    --
    Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
  3. The Netherlands sez: America has no privacy. by KutuluWare · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One of the links in the summary goes to the judgement on appeal from a case in the Netherlands of the RIAA (or whatever their equivalent is... there's like 35 plaintiffs) vs. some ISPs. The court ruled, twice, that the ISPs didn't have to turn over names & addresses based on the list of IPs the music companies gave them. The main reason was because the court didn't believe that MediaSentry was a proper means of obtaining them.

    One of the reasons they didn't like MediaSentry was this:

    The Preliminary Injunction Court also considered the fact that MediaSentry is an American company and that the United States of America could not be considered to be a country that has an appropriate protection level for personal data
    At least the rest of the world has figured out what most of us Americans haven't: America's right to privacy is a rapidly disappearing illusion.