Judge Says RIAA Can't Have Hard Drive

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A Texas judge has refused to allow the RIAA untrammelled access to the defendant's hard drive in SONY v. Arellanes. The court ruled that only a mutually agreeable, neutral computer forensics expert may examine the hard drive, at the RIAA's expense, and that the parties must agree on mutually acceptable provisions for confidentiality."

This sounds like a good precedent

[JWideman]

Could it mean an end to RIAA extortion in the near future?

woo, guess a few judges have read the law

[swschrad]

about time RIAA is held to the law.

Money can't buy love...

[MachDelta]

1) Buy/Pay-off "neutral expert"
2) Resume "business" as normal
3) ???
4) Profit!

Re:This sounds like a good precedent

[silverkniveshotmail.]

Could it mean an end to RIAA extortion in the near future?

Are you that hard up for karma?

no, no, no, no. A judge saying that RIAA can't have the defendants hard drive does not mean that RIAA's crap is coming to a crashing halt.

Good to see...

[blue l0g1c]

With the constant erosion of privacy laws, this is indeed refreshing.

I'm looking forward to the rootkit jokes. :)

Re:This sounds like a good precedent

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

A judge saying that RIAA can't have the defendants hard drive does not mean that RIAA's crap is coming to a crashing halt.

It pretty much does consider the RIAA will now have to prosecute the case on the facts. A remotely full hardrive with a defrag scheduled every week is all the plausable deniability you need.

Re:RIAA defence?

[whoever57]

if you can recover a file, you can usually recover the date of creation/deletion of the file.

Can the RIAA show that the previous owner had the date correctly set on his/her computer?

Re:Money can't buy love...

[42Penguins]

7) Prison! You must be new here...

Re:My suggestion...

[chill]

No, that would be step #2.

Step #1 would require a court order to begin with. After they get the list of audio files, you then identify them: your own recordings, legal rips, out of copyright, etc. The point was they didn't have rights to access the entire drive, but had a court finding to look for certain -- infringing -- files. This weeds out 90% of the chaff up front.

The /. crowd seems to love the "all or nothing" approach -- if they can't identify the exact files, including MD5 hash of the exact download, the RIAA has no right at all. That isn't the way it works in regular law, so why should music be any different? If they can show probable cause and enough "evidence" to convince a judge for a search warrant, then there needs to be a method -- however imperfect -- for dealing with the process.

Re:Stipulations

[cpt kangarooski]

A few points.

First, they don't have to review any file unless they want to, because the plaintiff gets to choose what it bases its case on. If they want to ignore a particular file then it only helps the defendant for them to do so. So your #2 is rather stupid. (Though from my own experiences, I would say that disguising a file adequately could work pretty easily unless the reviewer had some reason to look further, such as if disguised files became a commonly used tactic by infringers)

Second, for files they are initially interested in, I assure you, they really will review them in their entirety. I've had to do this sort of thing myself at times, and let me tell you, it is very boring. But it does brighten the day of the reviewers to come across evidence of illicit workplace romances, affairs, arguments, illegal activities (whether related to the case or not), etc. Regular ol' porn, not so interesting, actually. It's more fun to hear about things than to see them graphically. So don't worry about your #1.

Third, your #3 is again, rather stupid. If a file is found that the plaintiff is going to go to court with, the mere presence of the file is enough to go to the jury with. The defendant can argue that the file was put there by someone else. It is up to the jury to decide who they believe; that is their job. It's no different than if one side had a witness that said he saw the defendant do it, and another witness with the exact opposite story.

Re:woo, guess a few judges have read the law

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yes, but the RIAA says this is the very first time this has happened to them. So I wouldn't diminish its significance. I predict that this decision will be the gold standard for future hard drive analyses in the RIAA v. Consumer litigations, and that the RIAA is not at all happy with it, since the RIAA's ability to manipulate the results of the analysis is greatly diminished. These are not the kind of lawyers that are on a quest for the truth.

Isn't waht your implying enough to get the lawyers in question disbarred or at the very least censured? Do you really think that they've been willing to take that kind of risk on a regular basis?

Re:This sounds like a good precedent

[shmlco]

Didn't we just have the story about the moron who wipped and defragged his drive after it was requested for examination? And judged guilty?

Want deniability? Just don't download the crap in the first place.

Re:RIAA defence?

[ScentCone]

Man, what a total lack of personal honor.

Don't forget that you're in the middle of an entire thread that's focused on the art and science of being too cheap to pay an artist a buck for a song. So, yeah.

Re:They don't need to use the courts...

[evanrandael]

The proper way to examine a hard disk for evidence of a crime is to image it to another hard drive without TOUCHING the data on the original hard disk. Once the original has been tampered with, it is arguable that any evidence found may have been falsified and is not admissible in court. Also, if they planted spy software on your machine, you can sue them for invasion of privacy. I am pretty sure there is a law somewhere that prohibits unsolicited internet traffic to a computer.

Usually, professionals will use a live cd or similar tool to image the hard disk to another without writing to the disk being imaged. since the live cd loads into RAM and not on the HDD, there is less chance that it will be tampered with accidentally before any data has been accessed. All searches of HDDs are done from an image of the disk and should never be done on the original. standard Sec+ stuff, its dissappointing that the **AA would not follow those guidelines. I guess they really do just hope for the ooc settlements.

If the **AA did what you said they did, they did not follow proper procedure. Then again, they don't seem to be contracting professionals in the field that would know what to do anyway.

Re:definition of expert:

[iNetRunner]

Funny.. Though a simple checksum wouldn't be very good. A simple log entry would through it off. A checksum per directory would be better. *If one was to nitpick about the details..*

Re:They don't need to use the courts...

[polyomninym]

Wouldn't what they did be considered Breaking and Entering? I know they had some permission, but would what they did be seen as a technicality in your favor?

Re:Okay...

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

AVonGauss wrote: "Thank you for taking the time to reply, I am still confused, but I'm probably not the only one - at some point if I cry thief, it seems that I should have to state clearly what has been stolen or violated... Out of curiosity, was that a shared folder in the sense of a file sharing (like torrent) folder or a shared folder as in a Windows or SMB shared folder?"

1. You're certainly not the only one that's confused. The reason I know that is that I'm confused, too. Were I a judge all these cases would have been bounced on day one. These guys have no evidence of anything when they start the case. And then if they can't find some evidence in their fishing expedition, they accuse the defendant of having hid the evidence. It's a joke.

2. All the cases I have seen are Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella, or iMesh.... i.e. FastTrack clients.

Re:RIAA Defence?

[MacWiz]

Don't forget that you're in the middle of an entire thread that's focused on the art and science of being too cheap to pay an artist a buck for a song.

If we could pay the artist a buck a song, that would be honorable. If we could pay the artist $5 for a CD, that would be even more honorable.

But I'm not going to pay a buck a song while the artist only gets 16 cents. I'm not going to buy another major label record until the RIAA stops suing people and makes a public apology for being such assholes. I'll support the artists I like by buying tickets to their show when and if they come to town.