Help bust the RIAA's Vichy nerd

Ray Beckerman, the attorney leading the legal fight against the RIAA's anti-fan lawsuits, has posted the transcript of the RIAA's technology "expert"'s testimony. He's looking for skilled geeks to rip it apart, exposing it as the lies of a Vichy nerd who's gone over to the other side.

As many of you may already know, the courts of the Netherlands and of Canada have rejected the "investigations" conducted by the RIAA's "investigator", Tom Mizzone of MediaSentry. See, e.g. BMG v. Doe and Foundation v. UPC Nederland , based largely on the type of reasoning set forth in the indendent experts' report of Prof. Sips and Dr. Pouwelse of the Parallel and Distributed Systems research group of Delft University. Their report critiqued the "overly simplistic" nature of MediaSentry's work, in that it had omitted a number of procedures which would have been thought necessary to a sound online 'p2p filesharing piracy' investigation.

It should therefore come as no surprise that in the United States, more particularly in UMG v. Lindor, in Brooklyn federal court, the RIAA is trying to prevent disclosure of the "instructions", "parameters", and "processes" of MediaSentry's investigation. In fact, at the oral argument of its protective order motion, the RIAA took the positions that (a) MediaSentry and its investigators are not experts at all; (b) MediaSentry will not testify as to any copyright infringement, but will merely testify as to what it did, and (c) the only witness who will actually be testifying that there was a copyright infringement will be a Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, the founder and co-owner of Palisade Systems, Inc., who supposedly will connect the dots based on what MediaSentry will testify that it did.

Link

(via /.)