WSJ Confirms RIAA Fired MediaSentry

newtley writes "Two days ago we discussed the earlier p2pnet report that the RIAA had fired MediaSentry (now called SafeNet). Now the Wall Street Journal is confirming this report. MediaSentry has been 'invading the privacy of people,' the WSJ quotes Ray Beckerman; 'They've been doing very sloppy work.' Beckerman cites MediaSentry's practice of 'looking for available songs in people's filesharing folders, uploading them, and using those uploads in court as evidence of copyright violations.' MediaSentry 'couldn't prove defendants had shared their files with anyone other than MediaSentry investigators.' The WSJ notes, 'In place of MediaSentry, the RIAA says it will use Copenhagen-based DtecNet Software ApS. The music industry had worked with DtecNet previously both in the US and overseas, and liked its technology...' "

Comments

If by fired

[Dyinobal]

If by fired they mean their scam was found out and they got busted for it. Sure why not.

Re:If by fired

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got nothing against the RIAA enforcing copyright for illegally shared media. This is their duty and the artists are the legal copyright holders. What I do have a problem with is their methods such as MediaSentry's dirty little tricks like this, and the targeting of young teenagers and grandparents - which sets no real precedent and doesn't send a message to the real pirates except to say "we're a bunch of arseholes so go ahead and pirate some more."

So, what should they do? Should they subpoena the ISP and find out who the perpetrator is and then drop the case if they person is over or under a certain age? If they did that they would be right back on the front page of Slashdot for age discrimination, and for having selected arbitrary ages as being OK to pirate.

I'm not going to defend the RIAA's business model, but the type of criticism they get generally smacks of rationalizations. Their is no way for them to defend their media rights, realistically, but people blow way out of proportion the handful of cases that are incorrectly filed as if that negates all of the others.

I'll likely be modded troll for this, but I'd bet that 99+% of all of the cases even filed by the RIAA (let alone that actual led to decisions or settlements) were against people who were breaking the law and downloading / uploading illegally.

I don't want to defend the RIAA's methods, but it just seems like everyone who posts against the RIAA would be unwilling to accept ANY form of defensive action by them.

I don't like the RIAA, I don't like how they price music or run the business, but it isn't for me to dictate to them how they should run their business. And while I do download music illegally, I don't justify it by saying it is cause the RIAA sucks or that they shouldn't be able to defend their intellectual property rights.

Re:If by fired

[fwarren]

So, what should they do? Should they subpoena the ISP and find out who the perpetrator is and then drop the case if they person is over or under a certain age?

Lets call it like it is. This has always been about PR. Let those who download music know. If you share music for download...WE WILL FIND YOU.

While realisticly speaking, you have a better chance of winning a lottery than getting charged by the RIAA. Still the name of the game is image. In the long run. Going after 9 year old girls. Going after people who are seriously handicapped and on a fixed income. Going after old people who are even clueless about if they own a computer. May not be the best way to win the PR war.

I think their downfall was getting lawyers involved. They started running it like a protection racket. We get an IP address and someone says it was used by you. Pay us $5,000.00, say your a thief, a pirate and promise never download music again...even from iTunes. Then we will go away.

As a way for the RIAA to cap people for $5,00 weather they can afford it or not. So they can make a little dough. It worked well enough. As a way to stop actual file sharing...it failed. As a way to win the PR war in the public eye on file sharing. They went after two many of the wrong people.

Re:If by fired

[hairyfeet]

Actually I have a feeling that while many might look at the death of Mediasentry as a good thing, I think it will end up being a lot worse. Because before you could fight them in court and who knows, if you got lucky you might get some law school or even NYCLawyer to take the case. Now it looks like they are just going to bypass the courts and go straight to the ISPs, which in most places have a monopoly. So I have a feeling if you use BT or any other file sharing tool 3 times they will just get the ISP to bounce you and that is it. After all by going to the ISP you will have to PROVE you didn't do anything wrong, which as most know proving a negative is pretty much impossible. And most ISPs aren't going to do the kind of deep packet investigation to see what you are down/uploading, most will just take the *.A.As word for it. And sadly with so little competition in most of the USA you can be effectively cut off from the Internet thanks to the *.A.As if they manage to get the ISPs to join in(and since most have media services they want to sell you it wouldn't surprise me if they jumped on board).

And since the net is one of the last great ways we have to speak out and be heard I bet it won't take them long to figure out it makes a pretty effective SLAPP to boot. After all with a private ISP they don't have to PROVE anything, since most TOS gives the ISP a thousand out clauses. What we need is copyright reforms, not more craziness from the media cartels. Sadly with both the dems and repubs bought and sold I just don't see it happening in my lifetime.

Re:If by fired

[Bigjeff5]

Wait wait, you're going to have a cow about things like "who are even clueless about if they own" and "In the long run." but not the four incomplete sentances after that?

Maybe you should do some more proofreading? Bone up a little bit? I certainly wouldn't want you proofreading one of my reports, if you miss such obvious things. Half the crap you mentioned isn't even in his post. Lets go back to the incomplete sentances though. For example:

"In the long run. Going after 9 year old girls. Going after people who are seriously handicapped and on a fixed income. Going after old people who are even clueless about if they own a computer. May not be the best way to win the PR war."

Five fragments in a row. However, all he has done is used periods (probably for dramatic effect) improperly. Replace all the periods but the last one with commas and lower the case of the words immediately following said commas, and it works just fine.

Not everybody bothers with spell-checking either; it's a news forum for nerds, not a master's thesis.

Perhaps if you payed more attention to the context and content your criticisms would be more useful?

The Fall Man

[nathan.fulton]

...And all the while the RIAA will be the innocent victim of firms like evil MediaSentry.

...And all the while the RIAA will continue to fight the good fight against down-right theft.

...And all the while the people will continue to believe every last word of it.

They were evil...

[wild_quinine]

...but we can assume that they were fired for being incompetent, not for being evil. All this proves is that there is a baseline level of incompetence which is unacceptable even for the RIAA. I wondered how low they'd be able to go.

Re:They were evil...

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

there is a baseline level of incompetence which is unacceptable even for the RIAA

On that I beg to differ. The incompetence was something the RIAA was at all times aware of, and condoned. They didn't care if they got 20,000 or so 'false positives'. This was about creating a climate of terror. They were interested in getting something done cheaply, and it creating widespread fear. As it turns out the only people who ever came to fear the RIAA were the people who were not computer savvy and were not big file sharers.

And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders and ask them how competent the RIAA was in administering this campaign.

Re:They were evil...

[schon]

They didn't care if they got 20,000 or so 'false positives'

... because they still made thousands of dollars from each of those 'false positives' by threatening them with a lawsuit.

Re:They were evil...

[tftp]

...but we can assume that they were fired for being incompetent, not for being evil.

We should assume that they were fired for becoming a worn out tool, a liability. In politics the term is "throw them under the bus."

The reasons for that are obvious - they lied too much, they broke the law several times, they were shown to be incompetent, use unproven, arbitrary methods, and so on. RIAA simply couldn't use them any more, since every witness from MediaSentry would be immediately confronted with their own earlier contradictory statements, and RIAA would lose the case.

Re:They were evil...

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Mr. Beckerman, I frequently enjoy your coverage of legal battles around copyright and the RIAA, but please take care with your superlatives so that your important message remains strong. "creating a climate of *terror*" seems over-the-top. Maybe sticking with "fear" is more appropriate in this case. (Hope this is taken as the constructive criticism that it is intended. I want your message of sensibility to prevail!)

I don't worry about what people think. I tell the truth as I perceive it to be. If you'd spoken to the victims of this on a daily basis for the past 4 years, as I have, I think you'd wish there were a stronger word to describe the terror, anxiety, humiliation, and degradation to which Matthew Oppenheim and his gang of thugs have subjected them.

It wouldn't terrorize you, no doubt, and it wouldn't terrorize me, either. But not every RIAA defendant is like you or me.

Re:They were evil...

[StikyPad]

I think it's just that our expectations increase as the years go by. Pretty much every company I've ever had a problem with has taken steps to make things right, with the possible exception of Comcast. When we got charged wrong, we get a gift certificate for free pizza. When I called to find out why I wasn't getting some channels in HD (the idiot who signed me up failed to mention that the "HD Package" didn't include the Sunday Ticket channels), they upgraded me for free. (Sure, it should be included in the first place, but it's my responsibility to know what I'm buying, and their responsibility to explain it. They screwed up, they made it right). Microsoft lost the 360 I had to send in for warranty repair.. I couldn't prove anything beyond "I shipped a box to you, which may not have had anything in it, but it was delivered," but they still made good.

Now granted, all of these things were sparked by some sort of product defect or incompetence, but in general, things are much more reliable and cheaper than they used to be (which is masked somewhat by inflation). I can't remember the last time I saw an LCD with a dead pixel, the last time I had a power outage that wasn't due to a natural disaster, the last time my removable media "wore out" with proper handling. Think about how often floppy disks used to just fail. Or tapes.

For the most part, we're victims of our own success. We take more things for granted, and ever smaller anomalies take up a disproportionate part of our attention. What it actually means is that things are better -- much better -- than they used to be, but thanks to the rapid acclimatization of the human psyche, we just see more and more problems everywhere. They're problems that have always existed, we just never noticed them before because we had more important things to worry about.

The plot thickens....

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I really wonder what relation this had to the RIAA's big fake 'announcement' last month. I hope the WSJ and other journalists are asking the right questions.

Re:Bad summary: uploads != downloads

[paimin]

Dear lord, must we really suffer summaries on /. that confuse the difference between uploading and downloading??

Re:Paying a foreign company to spy on Americans?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the RIAA is already paying a foreign company to spy on Americans internet usage in the USA? Isn't that in violation of some state or federal privacy/computer intrusion legislation?

Spying? Looking at the files that SOFTWARE YOU INSTALLED on YOUR COMPUTER makes available to ANYONE on the internet isn't spying.

The RIAA may be scummy, but this isn't spying.

When it reaches large numbers there will be a bill

[Kaukomieli]

The business-model of ISPs is to sell internet-access to people. So if someone wants them to disconnect someone there will be a price-tag on this customer including the money spent on acquiring a customer in the first place and the amount of money the ISP expects to earn with this customer.

As it is a network industry there will be almost nil cost-reduction due to having a customer less (it ought to only effect peering-fees that can be attributed to this specific customer).
If a customer is not profitable due to exceeding the calculated traffic (extremely heavy users) the ISP will try to get out of the contract in some way anyhow, as is known from the discussions regarding "flat rates".

Disconnecting a handful of customers will not be a problem for a big ISP, but as soon as this gets an automated process regarding a significant part of the customer-base the ISPs will demand compensation.

Re:Something is Rotten in Demark

[kenp2002]

This will not end well because of one word:

Espionage.

A foreign nation becoming involved, one breach of security, this doesn't look good on paper, why the hell would it look any better in real life? Opps that was a military laptop with illegal mp3s... oh crap..