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Court Sets Rules For RIAA Hard Drive Inspection
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a Boston RIAA case, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Court has issued a detailed protective order establishing strict protocols for the RIAA's requested inspection of the defendant's hard drive, in order to protect the defendant's privacy. The order (PDF) provides that the hard drive will be turned over to a computer forensics expert of the RIAA's choosing, for mirror imaging, but that only the forensics expert — and not the plaintiffs or their attorneys — will be able to examine the mirror image. The forensics expert will then issue a report which will describe (a) any music files found on the drive, (b) any file-sharing information associated with each file, and any other records of file-sharing activity, and (c) any evidence that the hard-drive has been 'wiped' or erased since the initiation of the litigation. The expert will be precluded from examining 'any non-relevant files or data, including ... emails, word-processing documents, PDF documents, spreadsheet documents, image files, video files, or stored web-pages.'"
This makes way too much sense.
Just because my PDFs play in winamp doesn't mean they're music files!
Thurr and Mite! :)
Because its in a directory named "Miley Cyrus - Breakout [2008][CD+SkidVid_XviD+Cov]320Kbps"
Obviously.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
What if you liked to keep a lot of information handy about what you've been ripping/scanning ?
This still leaves you with the situation of having live thermite on a hair trigger sitting a few (inches? feet?) away from your knees.
I have no love for the **AA, but
I can't help but smile each time I see that
it's dangerous to let one's hatred of their philosophy and tactics cloud one's thinking.
Well it would be dangerous for someone like me to allow my hatred for them to 'cloud my thinking', since it is part of my professional life to fight this enemy. But I can't see why everyone else can't just kick back, relax, and hate the RIAA as much as it deserves to be hated.
If they believe people are illegally a[c]quiring/reproducing/distributing their content in violation of the law, then producing 'marked' versions of their *own* content to better detect those violations seems justified...
What basis do you have for suggesting that their motivation for flooding the internet with their own mp3's in slightly corrupted format is "to better detect ... violations"?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful