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Court Rejects RIAA's Proposed Protective Order
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that a few weeks ago the Court rendered a detailed decision providing for safeguards in connection with the RIAA's proposed inspection of the defendant's hard drive in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The decision instructed the RIAA to submit a proposed protective order consistent with the Court's decision. The RIAA submitted a proposed protective order yesterday, which attracted some thoughtful commentary by readers of my blog, but today the Court rejected the RIAA's suggested order, explicitly rejecting many of the 'enhancements' included by the RIAA, including production of 'videos' and 'playlists' which might be found on the hard drive. Instead the Court entered an order the Court itself had drafted. The Court explained that 'the purpose of compelling inspection is to identify information reasonably calculated to provide evidence of any file-sharing of Plaintiffs' copyrighted music sound files conducted on the Defendant's computer. Once this data is identified by the computer forensic expert... any disclosure shall flow through the Defendant subject to his assertion of privilege and the Court's authority to compel production, just as disclosure would occur in any other pre-trial discovery setting... (1) As should have been clear from the Court's May 6, 2009 Order, although the Plaintiffs may select experts of their choosing, these individuals are not to be employees of the Plaintiffs or their counsel, but must be third-parties held to the strictest standards of confidentiality; (2) the inspection is limited to music sound files, metadata associated with music sound files, and information related to the file-sharing of music sound files — it shall not include music "playlists" or any other type of media file (e.g., video); (3) the Examining Expert shall be required to disclose both the methods employed to inspect the hard drive and any instruction or guidance received from the Plaintiffs.'"
I typed some queries for lyrics into Wolfram alpha, and now they have to fight the RIAA!!
PS, its sad that I was modded funny, but my post wasn't written to be funny. I guess that's just the state of things with the RIAA where a semi-lay person's translation of an asinine situation gets modded funny...
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
renamed all your mp3's to .ffm
They violated the court order, your Honor- there is no way they could have known C:\music\Beatles\Sgt._Peppers_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band\Lucy_in_the_Sky_With_Diamonds.ffm was a music file!
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I agree with you. I would come down very hard on attorneys who try to game the system as the RIAA's attorneys do, were I a judge.
Is this your unofficial campaign announcement for federal circuit judge, Ray? I'd vote for you!
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There's no such thing as boilerplate, the way I look at it. Legal documents have consequences, and need to be drafted with reference to the situation at hand. I have actually submitted an amicus brief, and a revised amicus brief, in this very case,
Great! We can we can just cut-n-paste yours and fill it in with our own points.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Here's a simple suggestion if you want to compare lawyers: keep a set of win/lose statistics for all copyright cases, for each lawyer in this specialty.
Here's a simple suggestion if you want to ensure "fairness": Let both sides choose their lawyers, then have the judge flip a coin and swap the lawyers and clients pairings if the result is heads. That way, each side gets the best lawyers on average.
" ... Even the lay-people know the courts systems aren't completely fair. What manner of arrogant do you have to be to behave in this way? ..."
Why, that would be "RIAArogant.
1. Number of times the RIAA's "investigator" and sole witness has been deposed: 0
2. Number of times the RIAA's expert witness has been deposed: 1.
The day the RIAA and their minions burn in hell: priceless
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!