RIAA's Watchdog Affidavits For Your Reading Pleasure

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "MediaSentry, in an attempt to stonewall discovery in UMG v. Lindor, has turned over nothing other than a collection, apparently a complete collection, of its publicly filed affidavits. However, these do make interesting reading indeed, and as comments started trickling in on my blog, I realized that for the technically minded among you there are probably a number of good laughs in these materials. So in keeping with the Slashdot community's analysis of the RIAA's not very expert, 'expert' witness, I thought you might like to take a shot at its not very factual, 'fact' witness."

Re:They need to prove their methods.

[Curien]

The current mess is partly as a result of the difficulties with DNA and other scientific evidence. In the 1920s, SCOTUS created the Frye standard, which required that any scientific method presented in court needed to be accepted by a majority of experts in the field. This was a very conservative standard, and it meant that investigators couldn't develop new methods ad hoc because those methods couldn't have been widely accepted at the time of use. In the 1990s, SCOTUS instituted a new Daubert standard which allows any scientific evidence -- regardless of its general acceptance -- to be presented at the judge's discretion, and it leads to the "competing experts" situation that we have today.

IMO, Daubert is a horrible precedent, as it forces non-experts to decide how to treat expert testimony. With the older Frye standard, some prosecutors might have a hard time prosecuting some individuals in difficult cases, but it does a much better job of maintaining the integrity of the system.

Song file titles

[l2718]

MediaSentry claims to have verified that the names of the files they downloaded contained descriptions of music copyrighted by the plaintiffs. That they didn't bother to play the music and check the contents is very suspicious. It's true that the RIAA has been seeding fake torrents with damaged files and that filenames don't necessarily describe the content, so it's conceivable that the files didn't really contain what the names suggest, but I doubt that and I don't think you could sell this to a jury working at the "preponderance of the evidence" standard (I'm not even sure about "beyond reasonable doubt"). That said, it shows extreme incompetence on the part of MediaSentry. In my opinion this should be used to impeach their credibility: "if you didn't take this elementary step, what other important steps did you gloss over?" -- suggesting it's possible the files weren't song files is to "conspiracy theory"-like to work (the Thompson case reeked of such attempts).