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RIAA drops MediaSentry services

by on05 January 2009

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Evidence-gathering company terminated

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has terminated its relationship with MediaSentry, the company it used for gathering evidence against individuals it accused of illegally sharing copyrighted music.

The RIAA had used MediaSentry’s services to search the Internet for evidence of people sharing large amounts of music. The RIAA campaign (led on behalf of the world's largest recording labels) reportedly resulted in lawsuits against approximately 35,000 individuals. MediaSentry’s evidence gathering techniques were frequently criticized, and labeled by many as an invasion of privacy and heavy-handed in scope.

The RIAA offices were visited earlier in 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education and shown a demo of MediaSentry’s techniques to locate file sharers. MediaSentry reportedly wrote scripts to automatically hunt for the names of copyrighted songs and to locate the IP addresses of computers sharing files. MediaSentry then checked the hashes (identifying marks) on the song files to make sure they matched the copyrighted song. If the marks didn't match, the company used software from Audible Magic to compare the sound waves. MediaSentry then forwarded its findings directly to the RIAA.

However, MediaSentry only checked that certain songs were being offered for file sharing and had no way to verify the individual’s identity that it claimed was downloading the songs. Thus, the RIAA argued that the making of a file available by itself was copyright infringement. However, the RIAA shot itself in the foot with this argument when a U.S. District Court Judge eventually ruled that the RIAA “making available” standard did not constitute copyright infringement in the case of Atlantic v. Howell.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation had argued in a ‘friend of the court’ brief on behalf of Pamela and Jeffrey Howell against the RIAA's "making available" position, arguing that this standard "amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized." The federal judge agreed with the EFF.

He stated in his ruling, “The court agrees with the great weight of authority that section 106(3) is not violated unless the defendant has actually distributed an unauthorized copy of the work to a member of the public. Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."

This ruling was a huge blow to the RIAA and the RIAA announced in December of 2008 that it no longer plans to file lawsuits against individuals it suspects of pirating digital music files. Instead, the RIAA plans to enter into agreements with various Internet Service Providers to "reduce the service" to chronic file-sharers. This translates to limiting the amount of bandwidth available to heavy bandwidth users, a practice known in the industry as throttling. Of course, the only problem with throttling is that it can turn into content filtering, another area that some bandwidth providers have been criticized for.

After giving the boot to MediaSentry, the RIAA now says it will use the services of DtecNet Software ApS--a Copenhagen-based company the RIAA has worked with previously.
Last modified on 05 January 2009
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