Slashdot Mirror
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...' "
If by fired they mean their scam was found out and they got busted for it. Sure why not.
...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.
ARE they legal investigators in other states? That was one of the whole points with Mediasentry, they where illegally doing what they where doing in a number of states the RIAA had cases in. If this new company does the same shit then guess what, nothing changes and the RIAA is again violating the law.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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.
The MSN article reports:
Mr. Beckerman cites MediaSentry's practice of looking for available songs in people's file-sharing folders, downloading them, and using those downloads in court as evidence of copyright violations.
Whilst it's still a scummy thing to do, it's not as bad as uploading to peoples' filesharing folders and then taking them to court for copyright violations.
Somebody needs to do a humiliating break-in to the RIAA's new jackbooted flunky and pull out some more email and phone records. It was hilarious when it happened to MediaSentry, I'm sure it'll be even funnier in Danish.
Now, I have neither the ability nor the intention; but I can dream...
I'm not entirely sure, but I would imagine that the only people with a potential case against MediaSentry would be the RIAA themselves for "misrepresenting" them or something and I very much doubt the RIAA would sue their partners in crime, MediaSentry almost certainly has plenty of dirt on them.
I'm not sure how Privacy laws work with regards to P2P, but it's probably quite easy to show you willingly shared the contents of your Hard Drive with others, or you'd be able to sue every other P2P user out there who connects to you.
Then again, I sure as shit aren't a lawyer and in this Crazy, topsy turvy world we live in, anything is possible.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
...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.
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
From their web site:
"The evidence generated by DtecNet has been used and approved by criminal and civil courts alike across Europe."
I know it's too early to tell, but assuming if their claims were true...
If their evidence can satisfy the European courts, which are more protective of the individual (my POV, barring history), then what trouble would they have in the US courts?
"By only targeting content positively identified as illegal, the system avoids the problems of targeting P2P protocols indiscriminately securing maximum bandwidth for legal traffic."
Interesting, how would they know - they'll have to download a copy, right? If I record my own karaoke and share it out, does it count?
Also, won't they fall into the same "couldn't prove defendants had shared their files with anyone other than investigators" situation? (Imagine if they say that my <insert lousy movie here> episode is downloaded 50,000 times!)
The new company, "Yrtnesaidem Inc" will be much better.
I record my sleeptalking
RIAA caught lying about firing MediaSentry.
I once had a signature.
So what're the odds of some sort of memo surfacing from a jilted SafeNet from the RIAA saying something to the effect of 'Use any means possible! We have good lawyers! Don't worry about breaking the law! These fools can't fight us, this is America!! And in this country the laws are written by the people with the most money! Namely US! The RIAA, and all our members! Wahahaha!'?
Aside from the obvious self incrimination I mean.
I have nothing compelling to say
For false evidence you're probably right. The RIAA would have contracted MediaSentry and used their evidence for DMCA takedowns and court cases. As the RIAA were presenting their evidence they would have most of the responsibility, but corporations rarely get anything other than fines and if they're smart the RIAA would have contracted the responsibility for their evidence to MediaSentry. Any victim would have to deal directly with the RIAA's faulty accusations because MediaSentry were a contractor of the RIAA.
There is good news though as the hysteria around hacking has caused unbalanced laws that say accessing a network resource without permission is illegal. Remember there are some legal opinions of these laws that say running nmap on a server is illegal, so while most Slashdot users would say "if it wasn't password protected don't complain" the law as written is typically much less reasonable and for once this is beneficial to the public.
I think that someone would have a good case against them (whether they have the resources to pursue the matter is another question)
(disclaimer: I am not a lawyer)
Just because past experience has shown that the guys at MediaSentry tend to read all the online articles about themselves, I'd like to insert this comment here:
* Fuck you guys *
Thanks! That is all.
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?
You sir, are quite a well-articulated gentleman.
Am I the only one who wonders about the legal implications of hiring a firm based in Copenhagen? Do they suppose that that will protect them from the consequences of using investigators who are not licensed in the USA? Or do they plan to poison more torrents and release more spoof files rather than suing people?
The only thing I can think of when I read this is that they plan to cheat the system somehow and I can only wonder what they plan to do next...
> The music company usually retains the copyright
Not exactly, in most cases the artist(s) assign their copyrights to the labels, and this means that soon, starting around 2013, there will be an interesting battle in the Federal courts whether or not the artists can terminate these assignments as stipulated in the 1976 Copyright Act.
Shocked and astonished I am! Scandalous! That a company should do exactly what we pay them to and report to us exactly what they are doing, and that somehow we would still be ignorant of the exact nature of their activities! Those responsible should be fired, obviously!
Err... why's everyone looking at me like that?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
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.
But you are missing the upside to greedy ISPs. If you get rid of everyone that actually USES the amount they paid for then they can keep overselling like mad and never need to pay for any infrastructure upgrades. We have heard time and time again that it is these "granny" users that are nothing but profit for the ISPs since they use so little bandwidth compared to what they pay for. So by becoming the *.A.As buttmonkey they can cut off their "costly" users while having a great excuse that will keep 99% of them from saying anything about it in the press.
After all they were just getting rid of those "law breaking filthy thieves" and not just propping up their profit margins by not giving the customer what they paid for. Perfect spin while not actually needing to anything with their profits but stuff them in their pockets. And when you figure in the costs of actually upgrading your aging infrastructure I'm sure losing those BT and other file sharing app users will be negligible when compared to the upgrade, at least in the short term. And as we have seen time and time again in this country corporations have lost the ability to think past the quarterly earnings reports.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Any ideas where they go from here?
I don't know. Chapter 11?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
You had a good point a year ago. But now ISPs like Comcast are metering services and charging fees to purchase extra gigabytes. If they have customers willing to pay $100 to download 1000 gig per month, the ISPs will be hurting themselves when they let these customers go.
As for dialup:
I have that service for $7 a month, and yes it's a cheap alternative, however the drawback of dialup is that you cannot watch "live" videos at nbc.com or hulu.com, because they don't support speeds slower than ~200 kbit/s. You would have to limit yourself to only bittorrent downloads.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
While on the surface it SOUNDS like you SHOULD be right, you have to think like a corporate bean counter. When you figure in the cost of an infrastructure upgrade(because even the lamest home users have heard of Hulu and Youtube) then I'm willing to bet it is FAR cheaper to simply toss all those that use file sharing apps than it is to run the huge amounts of fiber and extra switching equipment and server upgrades required to keep up. Even if you charge them $1.50 a GB they will still cost you more. After all the Hulu and Youtube watcher is using bandwidth in relatively short bursts, whereas the file sharing app user is using their bandwidth 24/7/365.
As notorious as our ISPs are for overselling and under building I wouldn't be surprised if they have had bean counters running these very same scenarios and are probably coming to the same conclusion. It is simply cheaper to toss than to build. Especially when tossing doesn't require a huge outlay of capital that will show up in the quarterly earnings report. But I hope you are right. But if there is anything I have learned in the past 15 years is NEVER underestimate the sheer greed of a large corporation, even if that greed ultimately destroys the business, like what we have seen with corporations off shoring everything causing the products to become shoddy and the lousy service to run off their customers. They just don't think past the quarterly earnings report anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The kind of people the RIAA tends to go after are file share[r]s, people who use a lot of bandwidth.
Actually they do not go after the heavier file sharers, most of whom use BitTorrent, and have been for years. Every single case I've seen has been based on either the Gnutella protocol or the FastTrack protocol. I have never seen a case from the RIAA based on BitTorrent. The kind of people the RIAA has been going after are (a) people who never did any file sharing at all, but have enough money to pay a settlement, and (b) kids who did a modest amount of file sharing. All of which explains why their 'terror' campaign hasn't worked; the people they would like to deter are actually laughing at them.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful