The RIAA vs. Lindor - The Internet as Defense Team
To anyone who is following the RIAA’s overzealous attempt to put the music sharing Genie back in its Bottle, it’s obvious they’re fighting a losing battle. But they are fighting tooth and nail, and usually using dirty tricks since the stakes are so huge. Huge numbers of lawsuits against mostly working class people have been filed and it has become increasingly obvious that many of those lawsuits are shots in the dark by the RIAA, who are counting on the fact that the “little people” will be underlawyered and eventually someone will go to jail whether they’re truly guilty or not, thus justifying RIAA’s stance and its lobbying efforts in Congress for tougher laws. What the RIAA did NOT count on is that the defendants have The Internet as their Defense Team.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has mounted an online effort to assist attorneys defending these cases and to hook up those caught in the P2P dragnet with attorneys who will help them. How is the EFF helping attorneys? They’re using the Internet. EFF attorney Ray Beckerman posted in December on Slashdot and on Groklaw an opportunity for the tech and legal community to frame questions that could be asked in the deposition of an RIAA “Expert”. Now the transcript of the deposition is online and Beckerman has asked for analysis of the results by the same communities. The Slashdot analysis is pretty amazing:
Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, was scheduled to be deposed in February in UMG v. Lindor, for the first time in any RIAA case. Ms. Lindor’s lawyers were flooded with about 1400 responses. The deposition of Dr. Jacobson went forward on February 23, 2007, and the transcript is now available online (pdf) (ascii). Ray Beckerman, one of Ms. Lindor’s attorneys, had this comment: ‘We are deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers’ responses. Now I ask the tech community to review this all-important transcript, and bear witness to the shoddy investigation and junk science upon which the RIAA has based its litigation war against the people. The computer scientists among you will be astounded that the RIAA has been permitted to burden our court system with cases based upon such arrant and careless nonsense.’”
In the analysis of the transcript on Slashdot it becomes obvious that there is no evidence whatsoever on Ms. Lindor’s hard drive of Kazaa ever having been installed, which the so called expert acknowledges in the deposition. That’s just the biggest of the anomalies in this case. There are many, many more. For instance, Slashdot computer networking experts brought up ways that Ms. Lindor’s connection may have been used without her knowledge. They also discussed the Kazaa protocol’s habit of appending IP numbers to a Kazaa account, but not changing it when the account’s IP number was reset at either the router level or the ISP level. Other anomalies relate to the fact that Verizon’s timestamp and IP info were not verified. Bottom line is there is no evidence here that Ms. Lindor’s computer was ever used for file sharing. There is not a single scrap of evidence that definitively ties her computer to the incident in question other than the IP used. And Slashdotters also showed numerous ways that IP could have been spoofed.
Ms. Lindor, I know this is a tough time for you. But you couldn’t possibly have a better Defense Team. Hang in there!
Technorati Tags: RIAA, EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, File Sharing, Kazaa
