RIAA Will Finally Face the Music In Court

Falstaff writes "Exonerated RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen is expected to refile her malicious prosecution lawsuit against the RIAA today. The refiling will mark a significant watershed in the RIAA's fight against P2P users because for the first time, the group's tactics, secret agreements, and fee splitting with MediaSentry are likely to come to light, thanks to discovery. Andersen's attorney says he'll be 'digging into agreements between the RIAA, RIAA member companies, MediaSentry, and the Settlement Support Sentry. Part of that will involve looking at compensation, like how much MediaSentry gets from each settlement. "I'd love to know what kind of bounty MediaSentry got paid to supply erroneous identities to the RIAA," Lybeck says.' The judge has barred further motions to dismiss the complaint, which means the RIAA will have to face the music. 'Unlike the thousands of lawsuits filed so far, the RIAA does not have the luxury of walking away from this case if there's a real chance of embarrassing information being released. "Once discovery happens in the cases the RIAA brings, they run," Lybeck says. "This is our case now, and they can't run."'"

Comments

Re:If She Doesn't Settle

[gnasher719]

This was posted anonymously (0 points score, not posted by me) and nobody is going to read it, but it's interesting so I'll repost it:

I work for an ISP, and part of my job description is dealing with abuse complaints (including DMCA complaints.) The usual modus operandi when we receive a complaint is to verify that the address was in use, verify that traffic was coming from that port, and then send the user's name back. Someone else (not me) also contacts the user.

A few weeks ago, we got a request from a user who wanted to use the network to do research (it's a college town)--specifically research related to Bit Torrent. They wanted permission to conduct this research, and assured us that they would not be engaging in copyright infringement. They had written a special client which advertises hashes of the torrent, but never sends data.

Fast forward to about a week ago--two MPAA complaints against their IP address. We could also verify that there was no way that they were sending or receiving files--their traffic usage was actually pretty small.

My assumption based upon the data is that the company who sent the DMCA notification just looks at the IP addresses that the tracker advertises is a part of the swarm. They don't bother to download and verify that the torrent is what they think that it is, and it's in-line with other debacles of the sort (remember the usher mp3 one from several years back?), as well as some anomalies we'd seen where a notification time was shortly after a person had released their DHCP lease (sometimes the trackers don't immediately notice when a user has disconnected.) I'd love to say that I'm shocked, nay horrified that they would gather evidence in this way, but frankly, it makes good business sense. Why waste the time downloading every file? Almost everyone who gets tagged has been infringing copyright--there just aren't that many 'fake' files out there. And since almost everyone is actually doing it, they'll almost all settle. Those few who do not are easily handled by simply dropping the case.

For this reason, I would expect that blacklists like Peerguardian wouldn't really work all that well. Lots of people give me anecdotal evidence when I bring this up ("Well it works for me!") but that's kinda like saying that this elephant repellant is working because there aren't any elephants on my front lawn. I know a lot of people who engage in a lot of filesharing, and none of them have ever gotten DMCA complaints. Just based upon the number I see in my job, I know that they're not sending them to very many people, in general.