Prof. Johan Pouwelse To Take On RIAA Expert

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."

Comments

The Netherlands sez: America has no privacy.

[KutuluWare]

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.