NewYorkCountryLawyer's Journal: Is MediaSentry contract "Privileged"?

Is the RIAA's contract with MediaSentry, Inc. "privileged". The RIAA says yes. Marie Lindor says no. The RIAA made a protective order motion on September 27th claiming that the MediaSentry contracts are subject to attorney client privilege and work product privilege. RIAA executive vice president Bradley A. Buckles said in the RIAA's motion that "the MediaSentry Agreement provides detailed information regarding the instructions and parameters for conducting on-line investigations that were discussed and developed by the RIAA and its counsel, on behalf of the RIAA's members. The Agreement also notes processes that are highly proprietary to MediaSentry and certain sources of infringement that are beyond MediaSentry's ability to detect." The RIAA also said that "The MediaSentry Agreement is not limited to matters relating to the current lawsuit or even to lawsuits against individuals like defendant who downloaded and distributed sound recordings illegally. Rather, MediaSentry has been retained by the RIAA, on behalf of its members, to handle a wide array of anti-piracy efforts for the recording industry, and it has done so." Ms. Lindor's lawyers say, in essence, those are good reasons the documents need to be turned over, so that we can prepare to crossexamine about the (a) "proprietary" "processes" which haven't been peer-reviewed, and (b) the "instructions" and "parameters" the lawyers dictated to their so called 'experts'. Plus, they say, among other things, how can you have attorney client privilege where there's no attorney?

Thank you!

[cultrhetor]

First - thanks for the work you do. Second - could you contact me offsite? I'm a doctoral student working on a dissertation about rhetoric and legislative/political matters in the digital sphere, and your input about certain topics (not as an attorney, but as someone who extensively monitors a specific area of discursive practice online) would be invaluable. My e-mail address should be visible (with spam guarding). Thanks again.

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[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

There's no email address but in any event you should email me at [e-mail], non-anonymously. Best regards. Ray

Non-riaa music

[AC5398]

I don't know if you'd call this 'non-riaa' music as some of the music archived there definitely belongs to some of the bigger bands, but The Wayback Machine archives a great deal of live music, and appear to do so legally.

http://www.archive.org/details/etree [archive.org]

Apologies for putting this comment here, but your other article has been locked against further comments.

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[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Do you have a link to the Wayback Machine?

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[AC5398]

It's the link in the first post - part of the site is an archive to websites, some of which have long since disappeared except for archive.org.

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[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Thanks very much by the way. Wonder how the other one got locked?

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[AC5398]

Time. I believe Slashdot auto-locks all articles from further commenting after a certain number of days.