p2pnet - rss feed: RIAA expert’s ‘junk science’
p2pnet.net news:- An amazing, and revealing, document has just surfaced in the RIAA’s fight to force customers of its owners, EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), to buy their digital downloads.
It’s deposition given by Dr Doug Jacobson who, on behalf of the RIAA, examined a mirror image of a hard drive owned by RIAA victim Marie Lindor, the Brooklyn, New York, home health aide accused by the Big 4 of illegally distributing their music online.
“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,” says Lindor’s lawyer, Ray Beckerman, the man who also runs Recording Industry vs 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.”
The quality and qualifications of so-called expert witnesses hired by the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have been repeatedly called into question in North America and Europe, in particular, MediaSentry and anti-p2p and anti-file sharing technology developed by Audible Magic.
Audible Magic is at the moment apparently being considered by Google for its YouTube, says IT Week., stating, “Digital ‘fingerprinting’ technology from content protection firm Audible Magic will be used to pre-screen user-submitted videos for copyrighted work, according to the San José Mercury News, which cited ‘anonymous’ sources.”
Jacobson, a man with a 26-page CV, runs a company called Palisade Systems which, like others, p2pnet posted recently, “is trying to use the Big 4’s sue ‘em all terror campaign against innocent men, women and children to swell its bank balance, and which also uses the RIAA attack on schools to similarly enrich itself with its PacketHound application, outlined in the RIAA - Educause Request for Information, Palisade Systems, Inc, here.
“He also gave testimony for a 2003 US Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing when he supported the RIAA’s specious ‘p2p file sharing is responsible for Net pornography’ stand.
” ‘Companies like Palisade Systems in conjunction with research universities like Iowa State University will continue to develop new technologies to combat the evolution of peer-to-peer networks,’ he declared.”
Palisade, is, “the first network equipment vendor to license Audible Magic’s CopySense technology, adding content sensing capabilities to their products,” boasts Audible Magic, also stating, “Audible Magic and Palisade have cross-licensed technologies and have jointly developed the first network appliances that identify copyrighted works ‘on the fly’ combined with the ability to block individual P2P file trades.”
The transcript of Jacobson being deposed by Beckerman has just gone online and is certain to provide fodder for any and all laywers acting for RIAA victims, as well as for technology experts interested in how Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG claim to be able to identify their victims and specify what digital music files they’re alleged to have “massively distributed”.
And interestingly, it’s probably the first example of a case in which members of Net communities, notably people who post on slashdot and Groklaw, actively helped a lawyer frame the questions he needed to ask.
“Were deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers’ responses,” Beckerman told p2pnet.
Click here for a full online break-out of Jacobson’s deposition.
A numbered .pdf is here, and an AASCII transcript is here.
Also See:
Marie Lindor - RIAA attacks Marie Lindor’s son, November 22, 2006
MediaSentry - MediaSentry’s Dutch p2p foul-up, November 14, 2005
Audible Magic - Vaunted RIAA p2p ‘filter’ software, June 2, 2004
IT Week - YouTube ‘close’ to content filtering deal, February 26, 2007
p2pnet posted - RIAA dredges up old/new ‘expert’, December 27, 2006
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
