Good news folks at last the extortionists are being looked at with a legal eye.
http://www.informationweek.com/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205917949The Oregon attorney general's office is investigating the Recording Industry Association of America's practices regarding 17 University of Oregon students accused of copyright infringement. His office has submitted a brief questioning the data mining tactics and subpoena practices employed by the RIAA.
The AG filed a motion stating that the university was unable to provide details on user-to-IP address mapping for the dates in question for most of the IP addresses under scrutiny by the RIAA. The office is pushing to essentially cross-investigate RIAA representatives to ascertain the legality of its investigative practices--a discovery request that could be very expensive for the RIAA to respond to and asked the court to allow the university to determine whether the RIAA does, in fact, possess no additional information with which to identify the 17 John Does, and seeks to quash the plaintiff's subpoena as "overboard and burdensome."
The office further suggested that the RIAA may be spying on students who use the university's computer system and accessing much more than IP addresses.
The RIAA is supporting the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. The gist of this imaginatively named pending legislation is that schools would need to draft plans for technology to limit and/or prevent P2P activities on their networks.
Data mining such as the RIAA use is illegal in many european countries and its an avenue often overlooked by those who wonder how the laws protecting their privacy are being circumvented with fake orders made out to names like "jon doe" thereby ensuring the victim cannot fight them in court as they never get invited to atend, this sort of underhand trickery needs to be dealt with if the US justice system wishes to look fair in the eyes of the rest of the global community.
