Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
I've prepared a few expert reports in my time, but IANAL, however, as satisfying/intimidating these reports may be, most of the time they'll be downplayed or ignored by the other side. In court, if you ignore it, unless the judge is on the other side, it DOES go away.
I'm waiting for the expert testimony, because anybody can type up 30 pages that equate to "Nuh-uh!" but judges sit up and take notice when someone sits in the witness chair and says "Nuh-uh!"
Essentially, what I'm saying is that while the slashdot community will rally around this news item, the legal community won't take notice until there's a precident.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I understand that the RIAA is a popular target here, but why was this article shown in bright red when I came here a moment ago? I've read Slashdot for years and I've never seen that...
Either
(a)it was because it was one of the best written articles ever in the history or internet journalism, or
(b) all the articles start out red -- during which time they are visible only to people with paid up subscriptions.
I prefer to think it was the former, but am pretty sure it was the latter.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Artists deserve to make money on their work. We dislike the RIAA because they use questionable tactics and have a history of going after individual, largely non-technical defendants and suing them into the stone age.
And no, downloading music without paying for it is not STEALING. It's copyright infringement.
We don't want something for nothing. We want the right to purchase digital music ONCE with the ability to transform that single digital copy into any media or format we choose ... and purely for personal use.
I've purchased several thousand dollars worth of music over the past 35 years, and I think I'm justified in making a few MP3 copies of the various music CD's I've legally purchased and the older LP's that I've legally taped, then legally converted to digital media.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Piracy has always been here, so expecting it to ever disappear is just dumb. Let us not forget that the iTunes Music Store brought music sales back up. Have sales started going back down since they went DRM free?
You're assuming that everyone pirating, or even just a significant percentage of them, would have purchased the music otherwise. Do you actually expect a business model built around selling physical media in an age where the media can be reproduced by anyone at virtually no cost or effort?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The use of screen shots (and indeed printouts) from computers in legal trials in the UK in the 1990s resulted in a body of case law in which it was pointed out that anyone can make a computer show anything you like, that doesn't mean the data is valid.
(This case law was frequently as a result of a popular defense tactic against the Poll Tax. Just because a printout says X owes Y amount doesn't mean that this is true. You can't cross-examine a computer.)
It would be good if this argument made its way into the US legal system, but for all the flak that UK judges get for ignorance, I suspect they are smarter when it comes to technology.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You Poor fuckers need to get out of your parents basement and get a job you freeloading fucktaints.
Not a good thing to say at the start of a depression, friend. people have been guillotined for less.
Firstly, the RIAA has not "given" any funds back to the "artists" it represents, they're just a high profile organization that tries to scare people away from copying music - legally or otherwise. Secondly - their outrageous claims about "lost profits" and "starving artists" are patently false. It's like the US complaining about the lost tax revenue it has to bear every year by NOT conquering the world. It makes no sense. However no doubt the same accountants and mathematicians representing the RIAA also worked in the financial industry up until recently.
Frankly, I think that digital distribution of media - especially music and film, is the way to go. It's much more environmentally friendly and economically efficient - after all, if "pirates" can do it for FREE then surely the COST can't be all that great. There may be a slight problem with expecting people to pay $15 for a CD or $1 for a song, however. But look on the bright side, if artists earn less perhaps that will force the price of their cocaine down due to demand destruction?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I find this all very interesting from a kind of "we're living through history" perspective. What we've been witnessing over the past few years is almost the complete devaluation of the record company's main 3 products, 'recording', 'promotion' and 'distribution'.
Artists needed record companies to make them nice recordings and to promote them (advertising and getting their records out). The record companies made most of their money off of record sales. The artists made most of their money off of concerts and appearances. With recording equipment fairly inexpensive in comparison to the recent past, and free or nearly free software that can professionally mix, recording now comes at a very low cost. The only real advantages of a studio now are the sound-proof room and the technician that knows what they're doing. If a musician spends the time to learn and experiment with acoustics, the trained technician becomes less valuable, and all you need is some equipment and a nice room.
It's obvious to anyone reading Slashdot that promotion and distribution can be handled through the Internet now for extremely little money.
It's amazing to think how these 3 things which were so valuable for such a long time became cheap so suddenly. The argument that file sharing is anti-capitalist is completely incorrect. It's capitalism at work. It's just that the value of the job that record companies do is no where near the value it had even a decade ago. Ironically, pretending it's still the same is anti-capitalism.
You're assuming that everyone pirating, or even just a significant percentage of them, would have purchased the music otherwise.
No, I'm not. The GP was.
He implied that the majority of pirates only pirated in order to obtain a DRM-free copy of the music. The iTunes example provides ample evidence that it just isn't the case.
I'm not against piracy. I'm only against the rationalizations of many who engage in it.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Damn suspicious, this bias towards reality.
It would be good if this argument made its way into the US legal system, but for all the flak that UK judges get for ignorance, I suspect they are smarter when it comes to technology.
It's more general than that. The ENTIRE EU is more clueful when it comes to tech than the ENTIRE US.
$ make available
How could a legitimate expert in the field make the errors and omissions Prof. Doug Jacobson did in his testimony? It appears from what has been said that either Jacobson's academic credentials or his honesty are suspect. These omissions are not minor, nor are they so esoteric that a so-called "expert witness" could be forgiven for being unaware of them.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
No, you're parsing the GP's sentence incorrectly. The GP is not claiming that the individuals comprising the EU each have more knowledge about tech than the individuals comprising the US, but that the EU as a totality has more knowledge. In other words:
The entity (ENTIRE EU) is more "clueful" than the entity (ENTIRE US).
Savvy?
And neither would the production of music by the artists be worth the effort.
Excuse me, but your assuming that most artists have ever received a monetary return that would financially make creating & performing music "worth it". Here's a clue from a musician of 30-plus years; most musicians, even very talented and creative musicians, don't make anywhere near what it costs them to create and perform their music in just about any measure you'd care to use.
We real musicians don't play and write for money...we do it because the music is inside us and burning a hole in our souls to get out. Between instrument and equipment costs, travel costs, etc etc, we rarely ever break even and even more rarely do we ever actually get ahead financially. This is why the majority of musicians have day jobs. Even many artists signed to a label seldom come out ahead because of "Hollywood accounting".
Read this piece by Steve Albini on what a typical artist/band goes through even in the rare case they're even offered the chance to sign with a major label.
The Problem With Music
Even knowing all that, how the odds are totally stacked against a band or artist ever making a living from music, we still work, strive, and sacrifice to write and perform our music.
This is why the idea that you espouse is, no offense, totally wrong.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
citation needed
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Mostly innuendo and facts of marginal relevance.
Except for these two zingers:
http://lists.sans.org/pipermail/unisog/2004-April/
http://lists.sans.org/pipermail/unisog/2005-January/
Look for the messages regarding "MediaSentry". Real network administrators posting their experiences receiving nonsensical requests from MediaSentry and related entities for information about bogus IP addresses. Doesn't reflect too well on MediaSentry's methodology.
What would be interesting, and possibly helpful, would be a screenshot showing that someone with the IP address of a SafeNet office (or an RIAA lawyer's law office) has a lot of files on their computer with filenames suggesting kiddy porn or something to that effect. Introducing that faked screenshot as evidence would be interesting, since any testimony supporting the validity of the Safenet screenshots may support a felony case against Safenet (or the RIAA lawyer).
I don't have the skills/time to find the appropriate IP addresses, ascertain operating systems and such, and then fake the believable screen shot. I don't know that it would be legal, either, so please don't take this as a suggestion. It would be interesting in court, though.
I'll never understand how people can base a legal argument around a text file.
Unless you have an officer of the court present during the writing of the router code, the server code, the logging module code, storage of the logs, retrieval of the logs, and on and on and on... it's all absolute bullshit. Strike that 'unless', it should be 'even if'. There's not a person here (he said, as if it was 1998) who couldn't fake this shit given physical access and a week to study.
A text file is not a god damn fingerprint.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Another good one to read -> http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
He surrenders.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
You can't cross-examine a computer.
This is not true. I do this regularly and with great success. Agreed, it takes a bit of physical contact, but they all respond.
After some screaming and raging, pointing a bright light in its direction, and finally some slapping around, the Vista desktop responds with a blue screen.
The Linux laptop is a bit tougher but in the end still either goes into a comatose retreat, freezing X Window System, or shows its black&white console and dumps kernel.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ok here is where I have an argument. The conceptual difference between "copyright infringement" and "stealing" is null. So why the obfuscation and insistence that what you are doing is not stealing. Illegal enrichment is illegal enrichment.
Fraud is not theft. Murder is not theft. Rape is not theft. Most things that are illegal are not theft. Calling copyright infringement "theft" is just stupid.
There is also the principle that the law makers know what they are talking about and that when a law says what it says that is intentional. The US law says that theft is taking something away illegally from the rightful owner to deprive him of his property (thus a policeman taking a cigarette lighter away from the rightful owner who wants to light a cigarette at a petrol station with spilled fuel is not committing theft). When the law says "to deprive the rightful owner", they mean it. If the rightful owner is not deprived of anything, it is not theft in US law. For comparison, German law says it is theft to "take something away illegally from the rightful owner to enrich yourself". Immaterial items are excluded for other reasons, but the argument that the owner is not deprived of anything would not count in German law.
Thank you for your coverage of these events, even if you're biased. ;)
Everyone is biased one way or another. Your point?
I'm not biased.
I hate their friggin' guts... But I have an open mind about it.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful