A Federal judge has shot down a RIAA request to have their usual team of forensic experts, whose actual expertise is questionable at best, examine Joel Tenenbaum’s computer. Instead Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the RIAA to use a third party investigator, who will be required to provide her with a detailed description of their methods.
Although RIAA lawyers will be allowed to select their own forensic expert, the instructions they give to that individual will also be passed on to the judge, and their findings will be disclosed directly only to Mr. Tenenbaum’s legal team. They will then be required to share the report with the RIAA.
In the past RIAA experts have shown a great deal of bias, even going so far as to claim a defendant in another case must have a second computer because the one she turned over for examination showed no evidence of file sharing software or even MP3 files.
The examination of Mr. Tenenbaum’s computer will be limited to looking for music files, meta data about music files, evidence of file sharing activity, and evidence the hard drive has been wiped.
In previous cases secrecy about their investigative methods has been a cornerstone of RIAA cases. With no documentation of what’s being done or peer review from the scientific community to back up claims of its effectiveness you would think it would automatically be suspect.
Yet so far it’s never become much of an issue for judges, making it impossible for defense lawyers to get access to enough information to attack it in court.
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Result for: file sharing software
BitTorrent Inc. has had a rough year. The company looking to make revenue from Bram Cohen’s file sharing software is just another company struggling in today’s turbulent economic climate. The company announced on Firday that it cut about half of its staff, and replaced its CEO Doug Walker. The company already experienced a 22% layoff back in August this year.
Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has been named as Walker’s replacement. He has “two decades of networking, content delivery, and management experience.” Walker had left Alias Systems just last year to take up the CEO position at BitTorrent.
“Klinker has…been instrumental to the continued development of the BitTorrent client, BitTorrent’s Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service, BitTorrent’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and BitTorrent’s proprietary advanced congestion control technology. The latter has been at the center of BitTorrent’s influential discussions and well-publicized collaboration with Comcast Corporation, as it seeks to deploy a protocol-agnostic network management solution.” A BitTorrent statement read.
According to the Times, the company is planning to shut down its BitTorrent Entertainment Network media store.
