Its now clear to many legal regulators that the company MediaSentry has been operating without the relevant private investigator licenses in many legal cases where it has provided the Cartels technical "evidence", this is of course likely now to generate a few legal headaches for them
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080311-michigan-says-mediasentry-lacks-necessary-pi-license.htmlOne of the more recent controversies dogging the RIAA's legal campaign against file-sharing is whether MediaSentry (now a division of SafeNet) needs state-issued private investigator licenses to operate lawfully. It's a question that has been raised in several contested RIAA lawsuits, and now the state of Michigan has told the company that it needs a license to operate there.
An anonymous Michigan resident filed a complaint with the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth, accusing MediaSentry of operating as an unlicensed private investigator. The state agency confirmed the investigative firm's unlicensed status, but said that it does not pursue complaints "against unlicensed parties" due to difficulties with enforcement.
According to the reply, however, SafeNet has been sent a letter "informing them of the need to be licensed to perform regulated activities." The Department also suggests that the unnamed complainant contact his local prosecutor to pursue the matter, noting that operating as a private investigator without a license can be treated as a felony.
In recent months, MediaSentry was given a cease-and-desist order by the Massachusetts State Police for conducting investigations without a license.
The stakes are relatively high here. MediaSentry should be easily able to obtain PI licenses in all 50 states, should it so desire. Doing so could be construed as a tacit admission on the part of the company that it should have had licenses all along. And, if it turns out that MediaSentry needed PI licenses all along, the evidence it gathered for the RIAA has a strong likelihood of being deemed inadmissible. It might even open the doors for counterclaims from the thousands of people who have written four-figure checks to make the RIAA go away.
Lets hope these criminals are brought to justice for fabricating supposed evidential value claims against the innocent who where then pressured into the RIAA's extortion system based on "magic", that is the only way to describe their alleged proprietory technique of taking screenshots.
