The Slashdot and Groklaw communities were so helpful in preparing for the deposition of the RIAA's "expert" witness, Dr. Doug Jacobson, we thought we'd come back and ask for your thoughts on what documents and/or data to request from the RIAA's 'investigator', MediaSentry, Inc. The documents we have so far are just printouts, which were used at Dr. Jacobson's deposition, specifically exhibits 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. Of course we have some ideas of our own about what to demand, but we want to leave no stone unturned. For the technical minded among you, this is your chance to be a part of bringing the RIAA's litigation campaign down.

The Interscope v. Rodriguez decision dismissing the RIAA's boilerplate complaint, and the $9250-per-song-file verdict in Capitol v. Thomas, have inspired some new dismissal motions in RIAA cases. In Charleston, South Carolina, Catherine Njuguna has moved to dismiss on the basis of the legal insufficiency of the RIAA's complaint and on constitutional grounds due to the excessive damages sought by the RIAA, while in Brooklyn, New York, MS victim Rae J Schwartz has moved to dismiss based solely on the complaint's failure to state a claim under Rodriguez and the Supreme Court decision, Bell Atlantic v. Twombly.

Jammie Thomas has filed a motion to set aside the $222,000 verdict obtained against her by the RIAA, based on allegations she infringed $23.76 worth of song files. Her motion papers (pdf) argue that the verdict is excessive and in violation of the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution, and should be reduced to $150 or less, or a new trial ordered. (See, e.g. UMG v. Lindor). It has been reported that the RIAA issued a statement that "Thomas [is] not taking responsibility for her actions, and .... they want to resolve the case in a "fair and reasonable" fashion. It is unfortunate that the defendant continues to avoid responsibility for her actions....". In my experience that is RIAA-speak for "after the verdict we have tried to make a settlement with her, but she wouldn't meet our terms".

A federal judge in Tampa, Florida, has ruled that an RIAA defendant's counterclaim against the record companies for conspiracy to use unlicensed investigators, access private computer records without permission, and commit extortion, may move forward. The Court also sustained claims for violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as a claim under Florida law for deceptive and unfair trade practices. The decision (pdf) by Judge Richard A. Lazzara in UMG v. DelCid rejected, in its entirety, the RIAA's assertion of "Noerr Pennington" immunity, since that defense does not apply to "sham litigations", and Ms. Del Cid alleges that the RIAA's cases are "sham".

Several weeks ago it was discovered that a California federal judge, in rejecting an RIAA application for default judgment, had dismissed the RIAA's standard complaint for failure to state a claim, calling it "conclusory" "boilerplate" "speculation" in Interscope v. Rodriguez. In the wake of that decision, a Queens, New York, woman being sued in Brooklyn federal court, Rae J Schwartz, has told the Court that she is making a motion to dismiss the complaint in her case, Elektra v. Schwartz. This is the first post-Interscope challenge to the RIAA's boilerplate, of which we are aware. This is the same case in which the RIAA had sent a letter to the Judge falsely indicating that AOL had "confirmed that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed". Ms. Schwartz suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and has never engaged in file sharing, but the RIAA has pressed the case against her.

A few days ago it was reported that, in view of the RIAA's one-month delay in paying the $68,685.00 attorneys fee award in Capitol v. Foster, and its lawyers' failure to respond to Ms. Foster's lawyer's email, Ms. Foster filed a motion for entry of judgment so that she could go ahead with judgment enforcement proceedings. In response to that motion the RIAA submitted a statement that it had no objection to entry of judgment, and intimated that it thought there would be an automatic stay on enforcement of the judgment, and that it would ultimately file an appeal. After seeing that, Ms. Foster's lawyer has filed a motion for the Court to require the RIAA to post $210,000 in security to cover the past and future attorneys fees and costs which are expected to be incurred.

Can it be that the RIAA, or the "Big 4" record companies it represents, are short on funds? It turns out that despite the Judge's order, entered a month ago, telling them to pay Debbie Foster $68,685.23 in attorneys fees, in Capitol v. Foster, they have failed to make payment, and Ms. Foster has now had to ask the Court to enter Judgment, so that she can commence "post judgment collection proceedings". According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment. Perhaps the RIAA should ask their lawyers for a loan.

UMG Recordings, part of the Universal music group, one of the "Big 4" record companies, has brought suit against an eBay reseller of Promo CD's (pdf), in UMB v. Augusto, in California. The defendant, whose legal team includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting back (pdf), claiming that his sales of the CD's are lawful under the "first sale" doctrine under Section 109 of the Copyright Act (17 USC 109), and counterclaiming against UMG for sending out false notices under the DMCA (Copyright Act Section 512).

( That's my voldemort voice by the way )

Well I just did it, I order my copy of the new Harry Potter book. Amazon seems to have the best deal with delivery on the release date even. While you pay some tax, they also give you a $5 gift certificate for use in Aug, so comes out to $17. Even without it it's about the same as B&N with tax on the release date.

I think I will buzz through it the following week, I don't want any chance of it being ruined, especially after 6 books and many years of build up. Avoiding the store will help by preventing exposure to spoiling events that happened during the last release.

I also found this little tidbit on amazon during ordering. The clustering is a little interesting, Most of the top cities are in the Pennsylvania, Virginia, NY triangle. I'm curious how this plays out politically.

Oh, and July is the best month ever

July 3 - Transformers
July 4 - Holiday!
July 13th - Harry Potter the Movie
July 19th - My Birthday
July 21st - Harry Potter the final Book!

good night

I have a 30GB iPod but iTunes does not seem to agree.

When my iPod is connected to iTunes it says 2.2GB are free but hell if I can't add anything else to it. Trying to add anything more than a few minutes long just has iTunes yelling at me the iPod is full. It's so very annoying, if my iPod is only 28G big, at least tell me up front.

Not much has happened recently, but I finished a tad bit of web development not too long ago. Anatrove got a small bit of AJAX added to it after I saw my first and only introduction to AJAX. It is a nice addition in my eyes, being able to skim through the album randomly; a little dynamic aspect which had some interesting code issues related to it. Sadly the actual Client/Server aspect was horribly easy using Prototype. In fact, I spent much more time getting the visual aspects surrounding the dynamic changing elements to be just right than actually doing the changing. Ah well, it keeps my web development muscle exercised.

The other this is my main site shanem.net, it was pretty horrible and now it is much better. I had grand ideas, that were little more than that back in the day, and my site was just trash for the most park. So, that is all gone and now there's much more structure. I had a little trouble with the 'splash' page, but it's to my liking. Photographing paper is not easy I have found out.

Science doesn't have a good PR department, but there are a few things working for it. One I partake of regularly is a podcast called Radio Lab. It's an hourly show put out by WNYC. Sadly it has very short season. Season Three just started and there are only 10 episodes before it.

Radio Lab describes their show as "science bumps into culture," I would add that it's like a This American Life for science stuff. I highly recommend each of you, yes you!, give it a try. The only warning I will give is that earlier episodes can be a bit over stylistic to some; it grew on me, but some don't like it at all.

One of the things I learned on the last episode that kinda wowed me was that Placebos can have a Placebo effect. The color of your placebo changes it's effect. For sleeping pills, blue is a better placebo than orange, except for Italian men. The reason given? The Italian mens soccer team is named Azzurri which most likely subconsciously conjures excitement in Italian men.

Ok, I'll give you another. Your situation affects how you feel pain or not. Soldiers in war will feel lees pain from a gun shot than a civilian. It's theorized this is because the soldier subconsciously builds a story that they'll live, have a comfy stay at a hospital, get to go home, get a medal, a pension, and maybe even a parade. Where you and me, when we get shot there's no good story in our future.

The RIAA's challenges to Judge Lee R. West's order (pdf) awarding the defendant attorneys fees in Capitol v. Foster and to the "reasonableness" of Ms. Foster's attorneys' fees have not only forced the RIAA to disclose its own attorneys fees, and caused the judge to issue a second decision labeling them as "disingenuous", their motives "questionable", and their factual statements "not true", but have now caused the amount of the fees to more than double, from $55,000 to $114,000, as evidenced by Ms. Foster's supplemental fee application (pdf's).

( Also on LJ, with a few not here probably )

I was originally going to post about my cat eating stuff and something else, but the something else will have to wait. Let's get onto Abby and eating stuff.

I really don't know which to start with, both are pretty traumatizing, but let's start with the cute one. So my wii was just ... no no, it's cute, but bunnies are cuter, even sad ones :/

So, last night I'm in the kitchen cleaning up, and I hear Abby's collar jingling around signaling that she has come back in from playing outside. She jingles a bit more and I come out of the kitchen, go to look for her and I find a bunny instead. Sad part is, this is not a happy bunny, this is a young, not moving, bunny; a sad bunny. I'm just kinda freaked out that there is a bunny ( dead ) in my apartment and that Abby was part of this. I hadn't given the little guy up at that point, and make a soft poky device from a paper towel and investigate. poke. poke. hmmm

It was very sad, apparently that cat can hunt. The odd thing about it was he was still kind of cute, even in death.

Rachel and I took the kit over to a near by park, and as the sun set buried him.

Good bye little bunny.

That was yesterday, and it would seem that in a fit of rage over not getting her bunny meal, Abby viciously attacked my wii. Rachel and I were all ready to set out with Link to save Princess Zelda when the Wiimote was not showing up on the screen. It was connected, but no icon. We checked the other mote, same thing then investigated the Wii itself.

See, an hour or so before the power blinked out followed by a night lightening strike and a resounding thunder boom. I usually likes these two, but now it was suspected of damaging my wii friend. I figured the sensor bar got fried or something, but discovered a different culprit; several bite marks along the very long wire to connecting sensor bar to wii. My cat chewed through the cable.

This has happened before, I should not have been surprised, but here I was; surprised. My shiny new wii was now a cripple. I tried to mend his little cable much like I successfully did with my mouse, but no go. The wii cable is even much simpler, but not easier to fix.

There is a bit of a good ending to this part though, unlike the first. The brilliant engineers at Nintendo designed the sensor bar so that you can replace it with fairly simple things, like candles. Two small candles on top of the tv and the Wii is back in action.

Kudos Nintendo. Now, can anyone spare a sensor bar?

In SONY v. Arellanes, an RIAA case in Sherman, Texas, the Court entered a protective order (pdf), which spells out the following procedure for the RIAA's examination of the defendant's hard drive: (1) RIAA imaging specialist makes mirror image of hard drive; (2) mutually acceptable computer forensics expert makes make 2 verified bit images, and creates an MD5 or equivalent hash code; (3) one mirror image is held in escrow by the expert, the other given to defendant's lawyer for a 'privilege review'; (4) defendant's lawyer provides plaintiffs' lawyer with a "privilege log" (list of privileged files); (5) after privilege questions are resolved, the escrowed image -- with privileged files deleted -- will be turned over to RIAA lawyers, to be held for 'lawyers' eyes only'. The order differs from the earlier order (pdf) entered in the case, in that it (a) permits the RIAA's own imaging person to make the initial mirror image and (b) spells out the details of the method for safeguarding privilege and privacy.