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).

Replying to this was exactly what I wanted you to do - there isn't a pm option on slashdot. I think I've got this set up so only you can see get to my journal entries now. Had to subscribe for a month to do that, though... grumble grumble. At least it's only five bucks.

I can't get on lj because I forgot my password, and I'd have to log into my nc.rr.com email address to get it reset - which I can't do, because they block all web-based email services. It's dumb.

But we should be home pretty soon, so I suppose we can continue to deal with it... They have been sending you emails to keep you up on the situation, right? Somehow in the week that we had no internet, the email portion of the server got so backlogged that it won't do anything now. And apparently nobody on board knows how to fix it, so we're stuck like this till we get home.

In this day & age, not having email is ridiculous.

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).

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.

Thanks to this posting, Rupert and I are now playing a game: Find the highest Google maps route distance to great circle distance ratio.

Rupert started it with this:

Fairbanks to St. Petersburg.
Great circle distance: 3,840 miles
Google directions distance: 9,631 miles
My score: 2.508

I answered by stretching his route slightly: Kantishna Station, Alaska to Skarsvag, Norway. It's a pretty long journey no matter how you look at it.

Google's route: 10,411 miles
Great circle distance: 3,141 miles
It has a score of only 3.315, but it'll take 34 days to make the journey!

This one seemed like a good North American entry:
Google's route
gets a score of 3.7.

But North America is tricky. Just about every goat and Jeep trail is mapped, and we Americans cannot abide straight lines that aren't paved. Rupert's still managed to find some good ones: Route to distance gives a very respectable 5.6.

I've headed over to the Balkans, where the maps are usefully short on detail. Here's my latest entry. Lecce, Italy to Tirane, Albania: Route to great circle.

1267 km by Google, 216 km straight arc. Score is 5.866.

It's kind of a pain because you have to snarf the lat/lon from Google's URL and adapt it to the great circle calculator, but it's fun to exploit holes in Google's map coverage.

In an Oklahoma case, Capitol Records v. Debbie Foster, the Court has granted the defendant's motion for attorneys fees to be imposed against the RIAA, holding that Ms. Foster is to receive her "reasonable attorney's fees". Judge Lee R. West, in his 9-page decision(pdf), did not specify the amount to be awarded, held that the RIAA can have "discovery" on the reasonableness issue, and also ruled that Ms. Foster can also later supplement her application for additional fees. Her initial application was for approximately $55,000 in legal fees and disbursements. This is the case in which the ACLU, Public Citizen, EFF, the American Association of Law Libraries, and the ACLU Oklahoma Foundation, all filed an amicus brief on Ms. Foster's behalf, arguing to the judge that a substantial attorneys fee award was needed to discourage the RIAA's "driftnet" litigation strategy.

The RIAA is seeking to drop its case against Patti Santangelo, Elektra v. Santangelo, in White Plains, New York. This is the case against a single mom, and mother of five, which received a great deal of press attention in 2005. The case was discussed on Slashdot here, here, and here, was on national television here and here, and received a lot of other press coverage as well. See sampling of articles collected here and see Associated Press coverage here. The RIAA's motion seeks dismissal "without prejudice", which means that they could sue her again for the same thing. Their reason is no doubt to try to insulate themselves from liability for attorney's fees, since a dismissal "with prejudice" would make Ms. Santangelo a "prevailing party" under the Copyright Act, hence eligible for an attorneys fees award. See Capitol v. Foster July 13, 2006, Order Dismissing Case and Finding Defendant to be Eligible for Attorneys Fees.

A recently obtained English translation of the opinion of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal in Foundation v. UPC Nederland, agrees with the lower court decision that the MediaSentry investigation by Tom Mizzone was an insufficiently reliable basis to warrant directing Dutch ISP's to turn over confidential customer information to the RIAA's Netherlands counterpart: "neither the affidavits nor the cross-examination of Mr. Millin pro[...]vide clear and comprehensive evidence as to how the pseudonyms of the KaAaA or iMesh users were linked to the IP addresses identified by MediaSentry. No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service." The appeals court agreed with the independent experts report of Prof. Henk Sips and Dr. Johan Pouwelse of the Parallel and Distributed Systems research group at Delft University of Technology that MediaSentry's Tom Mizzone had not taken the "necessary precautions" in conducting his 'investigation' and that his investigation was 'limited' and 'simplistic', failing to "resolve... relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying....[failing to implement] "actual complete file transfer....simply [taking] filenames at face value and ...[failing to make] any correction for pollution on Kazaa [despite] [p]ollution levels [on Kazaa which] can be as high as 90% for some files....[not being aware 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)....[failing to take] computer hygiene precautions ..... The collected evidence of the spacemansam@KaZaA alias [query] 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". The Netherlands litigation recently came to the fore recently in UMG v. Lindor, a United States case, in which the RIAA is trying to prevent Ms. Lindor's attorneys from seeing the MediaSentry agreements spelling out the "instructions", "parameters", and "processes" of Mr. Mizzone's investigation, and Ms. Lindor's attorneys argue that the agreements are necessary for a proper deposition and cross-examination of Mr. Mizzone.

According to court papers by Henk Sips and Johan Powelse of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, submitted recently in a United States RIAA v. consumer case, UMG v. Lindor, MediaSentry's 'investigations' of copyright infringers using Kazaa p2p file sharing software are flawed, having failed to resolve "relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying by Kazaa". Professor Sips and Dr. Pouwelse work in the university's "Parallel and Distributed Systems" research group.

In Elektra v. Schwartz, an RIAA case against a Queens woman with Multiple Sclerosis who indicates that she had never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came knocking on her door, the judge held that Ms. Schwartz's summary judgment request for dismissal was premature because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL "confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed....". (Copy of order)(pdf) When her lawyers got a copy of the actual AOL letter they saw that it had no such statement in it, and asked the judge to reconsider.

In Chicago, Illinois, a Kazaa customer has filed a class action against Kazaa, Lewan v. Sharman, U.S.Dist. Ct., N.D. Ill 06-cv-6736. The lead plaintiff, Catherine Lewan, was a Kazaa customer who was sued by the RIAA for her use of Kazaa, and paid a settlement to the RIAA, and she sues on behalf of others who have been sued by the RIAA for her Kazaa use. In her complaint(pdf) she alleges, among other things, that Kazaa deceptively marketed its product as allowing "free downloads" (Complaint, par. 30); it designed the software in such a manner as to create a shared files folder and make that folder available to anyone using Kazaa, while at the same time failing to make the user aware that it had done so (Complaint, par. 36-37); and it surreptitiously installed "spyware" on users' computers which made the shared files folder accessible to the Kazaa network even after the user had removed the Kazaa software from his or her computer (Complaint, par. 42-45). Ms. Lewan and the class are represented by Charles Lee Mudd, Jr., of Chicago.

In Elektra v. Schwartz, an RIAA case against a Queens woman with Multiple Sclerosis who indicates that she had never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came knocking on her door, the judge held that Ms. Schwartz's request for summary judgment dismissing the case was premature because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL "confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed...."(pdf). Do they really have such a letter?

To those who might think that I might be exaggerating when I describe the RIAA's litigation campaign as a "reign of terror", how's this one: in UMG v. Lindor, the RIAA not only subpoenaed the computer of Ms. Lindor's son, who lives 4 miles away, but had their lawyer telephone the son's employer. See page 2, footnote 1.