Friday, October 21, 2005

New P2P File Sharing Case in Manhattan Federal Court: Elektra v. Barker

Yet another peer-to-peer filesharing case has been brought in Manhattan Federal Court against a named defendant.

This case is captioned Elektra v. Barker.

Litigation documents to follow.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yet another reason not to use Kazaa, Grokster... or any security-weak, transparent p2p network. In the Elektra v Barker case, the court documents show a series of screenshots of Ms. Barker's shared folder. Regardless of how she got them (downloaded from a paid music subscription service like iTunes, encoded by herself, or downloaded illegally), she got in trouble because they are in her shared folder. The RIAA has no way of knowing how the files originated or how many of them have been downloaded by others, or the number of times downloaded. They're simple there, and to the RIAA, that's reason enough to sue.

I have no background info on Ms. Barker, but my guess is she's either: a single mom, computer illiterate, a senior citizen, may or may not still be living, or any combination of the above... or a 12 year old girl... If I were the RIAA, I'd stop because they're looking like a bunch of idiots. Their campaign of terror is turning even more people off to the music industry and soon the backlash will reach critical levels. Hmm... suing 12 year old little girls is sure going to be profitable and turn that person into a lifelong music buyer!


The RIAA does not go after educated, technically literate people who know their way around the net and are capable of defending themselves from the RIAA's ridiculous claims. The RIAA knows this. Notice that not a single user has been taken to court in the US for using BitTorrent (only 1 documented case ever: a few months ago of a HK man for sharing 3 [bad] movies). Conspicuously, BT is not even mentioned on EFF's "How not to get sued by the RIAA for file-sharing" page: http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php

.. some anti-p2p lapdog firms claim BT is responsible for as much as 1/3 of all traffic on the net.

Your privacy on the net is a right, just like your privacy on the telephone or snail mail, regardless of whether you are arranging for Sunday brunch with an old friend or plotting to rob the local Savings & Loan. (Now, Ray, plz correct me if I'm wrong). The police don't open and read every letter or wiretap every person's phone. But this is essentially what the RIAA and their gang of hired goons are doing, treating every p2p user like a criminal and watching their activities, and in many cases, introducing network pollution and deliberately performing DOS attacks. They're not very technically sophisticated, not very ethical, and certainly not very bright.

I view the RIAA's snooping on my network and other p2p networked users' systems as intrusions and hack attempts. This sort of activity is unwanted, malicious, and dangerous, and in some countries, unlawful. If you want to protect yourself (and you should), staying away from Kazaa and using BitTorrent would be a start. Set up a router and a firewall, and harden your computer against intrusions. This goes quadruple if you're using Windows (the Swiss cheese of operating systems). Learn about computer security at places like
http://www.hackerwatch.org/
(owned by anti-virus giants McAfee/Network Associates)

and

http://www.grc.com/default.htm


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