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.'"

Comments

Re:misleading slashdot headline

[rtb61]

Not necessarily, it allows a walk away statement ie. he can walk away from any distortions. One example is the exaggeration that the P2P users, have no connection with each other, or knowledge of each other.

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).