There's a lot of noise today suggesting that The RIAA's data-gathering techniques are about to get slammed in court. This is largely because attorneys for Marie Lindor, a defendant in a file-sharing case, have hired Dr. Johan Pouwelse as an expert witness and, as has been widely reported, Pouwelse was instrumental in beating back similar claims in the Dutch courts. Observers are expecting the case in the US to take a similar path, and repudiate MediaSentry data-gathering techniques. But not so fast. Pouwelse is not magic bullet, as a reading of the Dutch court's decision makes perfectly clear. And while MediaSentry's techniques may not have held up in Dutch (and Canadian) courts, that doesn't mean the same will hold true here in Love it or Leave It.
In the Holland case, the Dutch entertainment industry group (Brein) that brought the suit was chastised for poking around on users shared folders, for not properly verifying IP addresses, and for failing to verify that a file labeled as, say, a Modest Mouse MP3 was actually a Modest Mouse MP3, and not a dummy MP3 planted by the recording industry to pollute file-sharing networks. Yet while Dr. Pouwelse was a key figure in the case, as cited by court documents, and was able to show that MediaSentry's investigations were too sloppy, much of the Netherlands court's reasoning relied on privacy violations that aren't obviously applicable to US courts. The emphasis is ours:
So while Pouwelse's appearance adds an interesting wrinkle, and may very well cast doubt on assertions of Ms. Lindor's guilt, color us skeptical that he's going to single-handedly bring the entire panoply of music industry lawsuits clattering down like empty beer cans falling from your mother's nightstand at the end of a three day bender.
