MediaSentry lawyers’ kit
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- MediaSentry is a company owned by SafeNet, another of the parasitical American firms spawned by the entertainment cartels’ insatiable need to find and then persecute their own customers.
Unwilling and unable to compete fairly in the digital marketplace, the corporate music and movie industries are using international legal systems in hugely expensive, but fruitless, campaigns to gain control of how, and by whom, product is distributed online; and, to force people into buying the product under penalty of being hauled into court if they don’t.
MediaSentry has time and again proven to be inefficient and unreliable not only in the US, but also in Canada and Holland. But the music labels have it indelibly written into their business plans and are nonetheless still employing it ruthlessly.
They’re using much the same tactics as their brothers in crime, Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which has been flooding the mainstream media with spurious and inaccurate statistics as reliable proof of illegal online distribution by American college and university students.
MediaSentry continues to be discredited but nonetheless, the Big 4 still present its “testimonies” to judges who, because they’re not technically adept, fail to recognise it for what it isn’t, which is to say reliable evidence of copyright infringements.
However, attorney Lory Lybeck, successfully defending RIAA victim Tanya Andersen, pointed out MediaSentry’s “investigative” activities on behalf of Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are not merely amateurish and inept, they’re also in all probability illegal, a view implicitly supported by the Massachusetts state police force, which has ordered the company to Cease and Desist.
Lawyers defending the 30,000 or so men, women and children attacked, but never brought to court, by the RIAA, are increasingly citing MediaSentry “evidence” as not worth the paper it’s written on and Ray Beckerman, the New York lawyer who both represents RIAA victims and runs Recording Industry vs The People, has compiled an invaluable MediaSentry help list for attorneys >>>
Practice tip : collecting materials on MediaSentry relating to (a) illegality, (b) discoverability, and (c) admissibility
There is going to be lots of litigation in the days ahead over the issues of (a) MediaSentry’s unlicensed investigations, which are a crime in most or all states of the United States, (b) the discoverability of the underlying MediaSentry materials, and/or (c) the admissibility of the doctored text printouts, prepared for litigation, upon which the RIAA will seek to base its case.
From clues left about by the RIAA’s PR hacks and other agents, it can be anticipated that their lawyers will argue that (a) MediaSentry wasn’t really ‘investigating’, (b) it was doing what any other KaZaa (or other Fasttrack) user could do, (c) it isn’t an expert witness, and (d) what it was doing was secret and “proprietary”. (If you find any inconsistencies among these, please don’t complain to me; complain to Richard Gabriel and Matthew Oppenheim, the architects of the house of lies).
It is important to the practitioner to be able to access a collection of the RIAA’s prior pronouncements on MediaSentry, because the RIAA’s lawyers will say just about anything, and often will contradict what they say in one context, in another context (sometimes even in the same document).
So the astute practitioner should be ready with a complete set of the papers (although it is of course a growing collection).
Here are some materials you might find useful. It’s of course just a partial list. If you have any additions to suggest, please email them to me, or post them in a comment.
A collection of MediaSentry affidavits and declarations
A transcript of the deposition of an officer of MediaSentry*
RIAA’s reply memo, in UMG v. Lindor, in support of protective order* (Arguing at pages 6-9 that MediaSentry’s processes are “highly proprietary”)(Arguing at page 4 that MediaSentry does only what any KaZaa user could do)(Arguing at pages 9-10 that there’s an attorney client privilege even though there was no attorney and no client)(Arguing at pages 11-12 that MediaSentry is not an expert witness)
Declaration of Bradley Buckles* (Arguing that MediaSentry was given “instructions and parameters for conducting online investigations” by the RIAA)(Arguing that MediaSentry’s processes are highly proprietary to MediaSentry and highly confidential)
* Document published online at Internet Law & Regulation
Lawyers might also find it interesting to read the decision by a Dutch court’s MediaSentry ruling.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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February 10th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
It would be interesting to find out what exactly are the highly classified ‘proprietary processes’ MS and RIAA are trying to keep confidential.
I highly suspect they are merely nothing more than third party open source software monitoring tools. To make and upload a poisoned torrent, you need nothing more than a tool capable of making a torrent (bittorrent, uTorrent, etc). Bit torrents are public third party software. Most capture tools capable of capturing snap shots are public third party software. Sniffers are too. I also suspect MS owned very few of the hundreds of IP addresses they utilized to carry out their activities – the majority were probably third party owned, hidden by protected Whois databases.
I doubt if there is anything proprietary as they claim except the activity and the manner in which they went about compiling their “evidence.”