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A Boston University student sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement has joined the chorus raising concerns about the legality of MediaSentry's investigations. Late last month, one of the Does in Arista Records v. Does 1-21 submitted a supplemental filing supporting his or her quest to prevent the RIAA from learning the identities of the Does. According to the filing, the state of Massachusetts issued a cease-and-desist order to MediaSentry for "conducting private investigations of the students" without the appropriate license. The unnamed student is asking the court to look into the matter further before allowing any evidence collected by the company to be considered.
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.
