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RIAA's Watchdog Affidavits For Your Reading Pleasure
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "MediaSentry, in an attempt to stonewall discovery in UMG v. Lindor, has turned over nothing other than a collection, apparently a complete collection, of its publicly filed affidavits. However, these do make interesting reading indeed, and as comments started trickling in on my blog, I realized that for the technically minded among you there are probably a number of good laughs in these materials. So in keeping with the Slashdot community's analysis of the RIAA's not very expert, 'expert' witness, I thought you might like to take a shot at its not very factual, 'fact' witness."
"I love the smell of molten server in the morning- Y'know, once www.ilrweb.com had a server...."
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Investigator: "They did it. I found out about it."
Defense Attorney: "How did you find out?"
Investigator: "Sorry; can't tell you that. It's a secret."
Defense Attorney: "Then, how do we know it's valid or legal?"
Investigator: "I'm a professional - you can take my word on it."
Defense Attorney: "Do you have a professional license or certification that backs up your word?"
Investigator: "Sorry - I don't see how that's relevant."
Sure this isn't something from a Monty Python sketch?
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
I know there's such a tactic as to bombard your opponent with unreasonable requests to wear them down and keep them distracted, but shouldn't forensic analysis of peer-to-peer traffic have to pass the same sort of examination as any sort of new or experimental technique? There's no kind of official certification of the process, so what's to differentiate a company specializing in this (such as MediaSentry) from a group of Computer Science freshmen churning out a polished but entirely inaccurate report detailing an individual's illicit filesharing?
When you think of the kind of effort it took to get DNA testing accepted it's laughable, really. Why computers get their own pedestal -- when anybody who uses the things knows they're anything but foolproof -- I'll never understand. And I program the things.
- UserLog.txt
- DownloadData.txt
- Tracerroute.txt
existed on the hard drive of the computer that was connected to the Internet through IP address 141.155.57.198 on August 7, 2004 at approximately 6:15 (or was it 12) A.M. EDT.Unless 141.155.57.198 was their own PC
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
just another business where a few principles in that business saw a lucrative cash cow when they were summoned into the foray. Now you see not much more than the ubiquitous; "baffle them with bullshit" directive, and you guarantee yourself future moneys from these awards. When you can dictate technology to a neophyte judge and jury to support your earnings from the action, whats to stop you! Who in their right mind turns down a chance at easy money!! Obviously not these folks.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Methinks thou doth protest too much. You seem to show up on every RIAA litigation thread, seeking to fan the flames of disinterest.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Yeah, Anonymous Coward is a regular poster around here. Most of us just ignore him.
Redundancy is good And also good.
MediaSentry claims to have verified that the names of the files they downloaded contained descriptions of music copyrighted by the plaintiffs. That they didn't bother to play the music and check the contents is very suspicious. It's true that the RIAA has been seeding fake torrents with damaged files and that filenames don't necessarily describe the content, so it's conceivable that the files didn't really contain what the names suggest, but I doubt that and I don't think you could sell this to a jury working at the "preponderance of the evidence" standard (I'm not even sure about "beyond reasonable doubt"). That said, it shows extreme incompetence on the part of MediaSentry. In my opinion this should be used to impeach their credibility: "if you didn't take this elementary step, what other important steps did you gloss over?" -- suggesting it's possible the files weren't song files is to "conspiracy theory"-like to work (the Thompson case reeked of such attempts).
Beware of that. They have a special way of spotting their own spoofs that we know about thanks to the Media Defender leaks. Specifically, Media-Defender spoofs had hashes that were divisible by 137, while MediaSentry had file sizes that were divisible by some large prime (for multi-file archives, though, only the last file was made divisible). I'm sure that they've changed some parts of their scheme after the leak (it's been very well known for a long time now and I've seen all this info brought up before), but I don't doubt that they still have sneaky tricks they use to identify their own fakes.
Still, you have a point that they haven't tested the files very well. Especially because of the way MediaSentry/SafeNet modified only the LAST file of multiple file sets, well, who knows? But they probably do have a database with all the hashes of all the spoofs they ever made. What would be more fun, though, would be to ask them how they know they're not someone *else's* spoofs. After all, that same archive I linked to mentions that SafeNet & MediaDefender had trouble interfering with each other at times...