RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online

RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online

"The online community now has an opportunity to see the fruits of its labor. Back in December, the Slashdot ('What Questions Would You Ask an RIAA Expert?') and Groklaw ('Another Lawyer Would Like to Pick Your Brain, Please') communities were asked for their input on possible questions to pose to the RIAA's 'expert'. Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, was scheduled to be deposed in February in UMG v. Lindor, for the first time in any RIAA case. Ms. Lindor's lawyers were flooded with about 1400 responses. The deposition of Dr. Jacobson went forward on February 23, 2007, and the transcript is now available online (pdf) (ascii). Ray Beckerman, one of Ms. Lindor's attorneys, had this comment: 'We are deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers' responses. Now I ask the tech community to review this all-important transcript, and bear witness to the shoddy investigation and junk science upon which the RIAA has based its litigation war against the people."

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/03/237211.shtml

http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg_lindor_070223JacobsonDepositionTranscript

I had the distinct displeasure of being assigned an RIAA case when I worked for a regional taskforce. I have never dealt with such obnoxiously self important "victims" in my whole life. They made it very clear they were looking at the publicity of the prosecution of the suspect above all and the suspect (and his rights) be damned.

It really broke my heart after forensically examining several hard drives to close the case as unfounded. I was able to prove that the "suspect" had in fact purchased all of the mp3's he had. Needless to say the RIAA wasn't too happy about that.

gorn, it's a pretty long read, but from transcript. No evidence of any file sharing software was found on drive. further no deletion and/or format of hard drive was done.

further there's lots of weasel factor on not wanting to say IP only proves which connection was used, not who actually did sharing.

he's the CTO and didn't know about business connections with RIAA. I find that hard to believe.

attorney doing interrogatories was equipped with 40+ pages of questions as a direct result of 1400+ feedback from slashdot. you can fool a few folks, but not collectively thousands of nerd readers of slashdot.

that's like asking technical questions about flashlights to cpf'ers.