MediaSentry & RIAA Expert Under Attack

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Jammie Thomas, the defendant in Duluth, Minnesota, RIAA case Capitol Records v. Thomas, has served her expert witness's report. The 30-page document (PDF), prepared by Prof. Yongdae Kim of the Computer Science Department of the University of Minnesota, attacks the reports and testimony of Prof. Doug Jacobson, the RIAA's expert, and the work of the RIAA's investigator, Safenet (formerly known as MediaSentry). Among other things, Dr. Kim termed MediaSentry's methods 'highly suspect,' debunked Dr. Jacobson's 'the internet is like a post office' analogy, explained in detail how FastTrack works, explored a sampling of the types of attacks to which the defendant's computer may have been subjected, accused Jacobson of making 'numerous misstatements,' and concluded that 'there is not one but numerous possible explanations for the evidence presented during this trial. Throughout the report I demonstrate possibilities not considered by the plaintiff's expert witness in his evaluation of the evidence...' Additionally, he concluded, 'MediaSentry has a strong record of mistakes when claiming that particular IP addresses were the origins of copyright infringement. Their lack of transparency, lack of external review, and evidence of inadequate error checking procedures [put] into question the authenticity and validity of the log files and screenshots they produced.'"

Comments

Make NewYorkCountryLawyer an Editor

[LordKaT]

Please? At the very least you'll have someone with an honest to god education who can proofread and write decent articles on your editorial staff, as opposed to ... kdawson.

Duh?

[girlintraining]

Yeah, digital evidence can be such a bitch, especially when you gather it remotely. You have no idea if the client (remote end) is telling the truth or not, let alone if it was tampered in transit or not, and even if none of that is true, there's still no way to link what a computer does definitively to what a person designated as the primary user of that system, simply because that system could have been previously compromised via a litany of vectors. In short, why this ever got this far is beyond me... The standards of evidence have slipped quite a bit. These days, you yell "computer!" in a crowded court room and bring in an "expert" in a suit, and the judge and jury will believe just about anything. IP addresses and hashes as "digital fingerprints"? a smack of MP3s on a hard-drive is "evidence"? If I rip a CD I legally purchased, encode it into MP3, and then the CD is damaged and thrown away, or stolen, does that make my digital copy illegal? Apparently. things that are perfectly legal to do to their physical counterparts become illegal to do when a computer becomes involved, simply because someone yelled "computer!" in a crowded court room.

Please god, send us a lawyer worthy of Mordor.

Re:Duh?

[girlintraining]

I'm not fan of the tactics of the RIAA, but posts like yours drive me insane. Why do computer geeks seemingly have so much trouble with the concept of "guilty beyond a *reasonable* doubt?" The quote is NOT "guilty beyond all doubt".

Cases based largely if not entirely on circumstantial evidence (which is what data remotely gathered is), do not rise to "beyond a reasonable doubt". I'd go as far as to say -- why the hell does this get before a judge and not get thrown out? Because the judge doesn't understand that all the crap that RIAA puts in front of him/her is circumstantial. And then they sign a bunch of warrants and set everything in motion -- which thanks to recent supreme court rulings, can be admissible even if the original reasons were complete bunk. So in short, RIAA is playing on the technical ignorance of judges to advance these cases, hoping that their circumstantial evidence leads to admissible evidence at trial.

And THAT is the abuse of the system, and posts like yours "drive me insane" because posters like you fail to see the larger issue because you're hyper-focused on the little tiny things like whether a certain word was stressed or not.