It looks like the RIAA have dug themslves a hole in making yet more false claims to extort folks.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080123-p2p-defendant-riaa-identified-an-ip-address-not-a-person.htmlA South Carolina woman sued by the record labels for file-sharing is fighting the RIAA's attempt to amend its original complaint is arguing that the RIAA's proposed amended complaint contradicts the testimony of an expert witness that testified for the labels in the Jammie Thomas trial.
In the response to the RIAA's motion seeking to amend its original complaint (thanks to copyright attorney Ray Beckerman for digging it up), Njuguna's attorney Jason Scott Luck points out that the language in the amended complaint directly contradicts the testimony of Doug Jacobson, the RIAA's expert witness who testified in the Thomas trial and has given depositions in several other cases.
According to the amended complaint, "Plaintiffs identified an individual using on the P2P network KaZaA at IP address 67.9.63.16 2005-10-29 on October 29, 2005 at 03:22:51 distributing 361 audio files over the Internet." But Jacobson testified that SafeNet, the RIAA's investigator, is incapable of identifying an individual.
The RIAA's investigators didn't identify an individual in Atlantic v. Njuguna, as the complaint says, merely the IP address of a piece of Internet-facing hardware like a cable or DSL modem. They may also be able to get the IP address of the device directly connected to the hardware, which could be a PC, laptop, wireless router, or something else. Either way, it's not an individual, and the RIAA's lack of precision in its complaints is troubling.
Its been clear for some time that they have tried to pretend to many courts that soley having the IP address somehow implicates the bill payer in liability but as the courts have ruled each time this is not the same as having proof of who was at the machine and has no real relevance in assigning liability.
Lets see the extortionists wriggle their way out of this one.
