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Is RIAA's Linares Affidavit Technically Valid?
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In support of its ex parte, 'John Doe,' discovery applications against college students, the RIAA has been using a declaration by its 'Anti-Piracy' Vice President Carlos Linares (PDF) to show the judge that it has a good copyright infringement case against the 'John Does.' A Boston University student has challenged the validity of Mr. Linares's declaration, and the RIAA is fighting back. Would appreciate the Slashdot community's take on the validity of Mr. Linares's 'science.'"
Of course P2P users can know each other really well and can know exactly with whom they are exchanging content they are fully legally entitled to, also in joining a specific P2P network, they are forming a new association, based upon shared expectations of what they mutually expect from this new relationship, an extension to that is the sharing of a part of their personal and private space i.e. a part of their hard disk drive storage space in their personal computer and their files that they have stored their, and upon a mutual understanding of not exploiting that trust and abusing that relationship by using it in a false, deceitful and fraudulent manner.
The second major lie is of course that 'users' can be identified by their IP address, and hugely misleading fabrication, the only way one user, human being, can be identified by an IP address, is if that IP address was embedded in a device inserted in their body, even then it would be impossible to say that the IP address response was not being generated by another electronic device that had no association with that user at all. An IP address provides a temporary, non fixed, transitory, addressing protocol, so that electronic devices can effectively exchange data across a shared interconnected network. Many devices can exactly the same IP address, they can even connect at the same time, but that will cause network problems for those devices and problems for any other devices attempting to communicate with them. However it terms of routing network traffic, many millions of devices a currently connected to the Internet with exactly the same IP address beyond the default IP address of routers. The lie is again carried over to where Media Sentry, identifies the 'individual' what a crock, this lie is even extended to the ISP, that somehow the ISP can identify who is using the electronic device at the time.
It would also seem that the RIAA claims copyright on file names, if heaven forbid, you have file names that in part, or whole, including misspellings, match with file names that the RIAA or Media Sentry might possibly association with works they are claiming protection for, you are somehow infringing copyright.
That closing bit is most telling, we have no idea who is committing the copyright infringement, finally the truth, but we want to prosecute somebody, anybody and everybody based upon a, we say so basis, and a temporary IP address issued by an ISP that is of sufficient security and legal documentation and verification of identity as is necessary to manage a $25 a month Internet account (seriously how much technical effort and expense do you put in to manage and record and track that cheap an account especially hundreds of thousands of them).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It is possible to spoof email, MAC, and IP addresses, but I don't know the likelihood of being able to spoof the IP while participating in file sharing with bit torrent or limewire.
It is also very possible to spoof caller id.
Are these good arguments?
I think there are enough holes in their statements to bring it into question, but this stuff is very technical and may be difficult to explain in court, although the MPAA is trying to do the same, albeit poorly.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Also, further to point 11. The copyrights are for the particular performance. There may be many performances of one work, even by the same artist, and the copyrights held by different people. I have downloaded songs directly from an artist's site, where the song also exists on RIAA labels. A search matching the artist and title won't prove that it was a performance their clients hold copyrights to. They may not even know whether other copies exist, who holds the copyright to them, and what the distribution rights are. And if they do, they're showing willful neglect if they prosecute without establishing and documenting this first!
They don't have to prove guilt without the shadow of a doubt. They just need to prove the most probable guilt.
But they do need to prove you guilty beyond circumstantial evidence