p2p news / p2pnet: Organized Music fink firm MediaSentry was in July once again found to have presented shoddy and, ultimately, extremely costly, results to one of its clients.

It blew the game for the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) in 2004 when the latter demanded that a Canadian court order five ISPs to hand over the names of clients. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein was singularly and quotably unimpressed by MediaSentry ‘evidence’.

Then the company blew it again in Holland when the District Court of Utrecht decided MediaSentry’s investigation of p2p file sharing wasn’t only flawed, it was “unlawful,” ruling that Dutch ISPs didn’t have to provide customer information to the CRIA’s Netherlands counterparts.

Recording Industry vs The People already has MediaSentry boss Gary Millin’s Toronto deposition online. Now it’s obtained a transcript of the MediaSentry’s Dutch Disaster.

Interestingly, Delft University of Technology’s Johan Pouwelse and Henk Sips were expert witnesses in the Dutch case. Professor Sips leads the Parallel and Distributed Systems (PDS) research group, and Dr Pouwelse works within the PDS group and also conducts and coordinates p2p file sharing research.

Meanwhile, “The technical information provided by MediaSentry is limited and their measurement procedure is simplistic,” said Henk and Pouwelse.

“MediaSentry did not conduct a thorough investigation such as outlined above to provide evidence of infringement.

“The statement from Tom Mizzone hints in item 27 that they systematically searched the Kazaa network for certain keywords, by means of modified Kazaa software. How they resolved relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying by Kazaa is unclear.

“In item 28, it is stated that no actual complete file transfer took place; It was only initiated at this stage.

“Item 30 again hints that MediaSentry simply took filenames at face value and did not mention any correction for pollution on Kazaa. Pollution levels can be as high as 90% for some files.

“Item 33 indicates that MediaSentry has no knowledge of the limitations of Kazaa in file searching. Not many of the 2,499,121 users online would be able to see the mentioned 736 files. Reliable global searching in P2P file sharing networks is still an unsolved problem. Only users connected to the same Kazaa Superpeer are guaranteed to see these files when Kazaa operates properly (roughly 100 to 150 users as measured by Prof. Keith Ross).

“Item 36 states that no computer hygiene precautions where taken. The collected evidence of the spacemansam@KaZaA alias cleary contains multi-peer downloading contamination. Therefore, it is difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses. It is possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, thus there was only involvement and no actual contribution.”

We were working on a post of the Millin deposition, but it was inadvertently over-written. Meanwhile, you can still DL an unedited copy (see above). It makes excellent reading towards the end. And on a side note, p2pnet will be involved in an upcoming PDS project when it eventually lifts off.

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 political representatives. 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.

See:-
blew the game - Keep on swapping! Cdn file sharers told, March 31, 2005
p2p file sharing - BitTorrent: chapter and verse, December 14, 2004

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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