Submission + - Prof. Johan Pouwelse to Take on RIAA Expert
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Marie Lindor has retained an expert witness of her own to fight the RIAA, and to debunk the testimony and reports of the RIAA's expert" Dr. Doug Jacobson, the "reliability" of which has been challenged by Ms. Lindor in her Brooklyn federal court case, UMG v. Lindor. Ms. Lindor's expert is none other than Prof. Johan Pouwelse, Chairman of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology. It was Prof. Pouwelse's scathing analysis of the RIAA's MediaSentry "investigations" (pdf) in Foundation v. UPC Nederland in the Netherlands which caused the (pdf) courts (pdf) in that country to direct the ISP's there not to turn over the names and addresses of their subscribers, thus nipping in the bud the RIAA's intended litigation juggernaut in that country. Prof. Pouwelse testified in the Netherlands that the RIAA's MediaSentry investigation — upon which Dr. Jacobson relies and the veracity of which he 'assumes' — 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.....[failing to take] computer hygiene precautions ..... [with respect to] multi-peer downloading contamination. Therefore, [making it] ... difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses ...[it being] possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, [with] ... involvement [but] ...no actual contribution". The notice of designation of expert witness and his curriculum vitae are here."
