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."

Comments

Re:Uh, he's *not* a journalist, maybe?

[hedwards]

That's one of the schools of thought, but the other is that if people allow it to go unchallenged it tends to seep into the public consciousness. Sort of like how the 2nd amendment went from protecting the right of militias to possess and bear the weapons necessary to operate to enabling everybody to own machine guns.

Every time somebody misstates the 2nd amendment as the latter rather than the former it just gets that much more ingrained in "truthiness."

Or a more on topic example, every time a troll like that makes a statement like that, ignoring it runs the risk of legitimizing it. Of course responding to it also encourages it, but it's really hard to say what's more problematic in the long term.