Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Case, Capitol vs. Thomas #2, Starts Monday
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's first trial verdict having been tossed out last year, the RIAA is coming back for a second round starting Monday. This time the trial will be in Minneapolis, rather than Duluth, and the defendant will have a team of pro bono lawyers on her side. But perhaps the most important new development is that this time, the 'technical' evidence garnered by MediaSentry and 'explained' by the RIAA's expert witness Doug Jacobson, will not get the free pass it got the first time around. In the 2007 trial in Capitol Records v. Thomas, no objection was made by defendant's lawyer to the MediaSentry/Doug Jacobson 'evidence' upon which the RIAA relied, and the evidence was admitted without objection. This time there will be no free ride, as defendant's tech-savvy lawyers have already filed a list of objections to the RIAA's proposed exhibits. Most notably, they attack the 'technical' materials submitted by MediaSentry and Dr. Doug Jacobson under Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which requires evidence based on 'scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge' to be based on sufficient facts or data, to be the product of reliable principles and methods, and to be the result of those principles and methods having been applied reliably to the facts of the case. If the evidence fails to meet those standards, it is inadmissible. This judge has already shown acute awareness of these principles in deciding which subjects the defendant's expert could and could not address. This should be interesting."
This should be interesting.
This case seems like the exact type of case the RIAA avoids like the plague. Any time any of their methods are subjected to any serious scrutiny, they drop the case and run. They know any serious discovery will kill their racket.
So what's to keep them from dropping this like a radioactive potato when the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers start to tear Mediasentry a new one? It would be nice if the case went on long enough for this Rule 702 thing to kill Mediasentry gathered evidence - which could hopefully be used as a precedent for other cases or requests for retrial. But at this point I'm not counting on the RIAA staying with this one long enough for even that much good to come from it.
Hopefully I'm missing something.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Thanks, Ray, now I have plenty of bedtime reading!
BTW, I notice that those transcripts were posted on your blog more than a year after the trial itself. We Slashdotters are used to practically instant access to everything, so I'm curious: what takes so long for such transcripts to become available? Could the transparency of the court system improve in the future because of technological advances, or are there lots of legal issues involved which impede this?
You realize that by criticizing the RIAA evidence you are implicitly agreeing that the defendant would be financially liable were better quality evidence produced.
What's the biggest word in that sentence? WERE.
If better evidence WERE to be produced, then maybe. But so far none has, and (so far at least) we have that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing.
And again, Mediasentry are not cops. They are not officers of the court. There are merely people with a story to tell. The defendant is another person with another story to tell.
So sure, IF better evidence were to have been collected, and IF she actually was guilty of something, and IF there was actual evidence to collect, and IF it was illegal to "make available", THEN maybe she'd be liable for some damages.
But that's a lot of IFs.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.