Dec 29 2005
Sony and the EFF reach a tentative settlement
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has come to a tentative agreement that will settle a number of the class action lawsuits that have been brought against Sony. I hope the Sony and the other music corporations will learn from this and take a little kinder and mature approach towards their customers in the future.
In related news, one of the RIAA’s primary tools for finding who has been sharing files is being challenged in court. Called an ‘ex parte’ order, it’s basically a subpoena that allows the RIAA to go fishing through an ISP’s log files, and many judges have apparently been allowing this without much technical oversight. The programmer, Zi Mei, is also challenging the validity of the IP addresses that the RIAA did find through these means. Just because you had an IP they found in their logs at one time, doesn’t mean you were the one who ’stole’ their music. Off the top of my head, I can probably think of a dozen ways the logs could be wrong, and I’m sure there are dozens more a good network engineer could explain.
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