Just when you thought consumers might be getting the upperhand (although we do when it comes to PR), the RIAA wins a case against someone who formatted his hard drive.  Seriously, I’ve reformatted my hard drive many times, can you really link a format of your to covering your tracks? Lets talk about the number of people who reformat their drives because of Viruses or because of Windows issues.

One of the most closely-watched copyright infringement lawsuits brought by the RIAA appears to be coming to a screeching halt, much to the music industry’s delight. A judge ruled Monday that a defendant had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence of his P2P activities after being notified of pending legal action by the RIAA. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions.”

After that ruling, it appeared as though Atlantic v. Howell was headed for a bench trial this fall, but at the end of July, the record labels filed a motion seeking judgment in their favor due to what they characterized as Howell’s attempts to cover his tracks. According to the RIAA’s brief, Howell destroyed evidence on four separate occasions after first receiving the prelitigation settlement letter and later being served with the lawsuit. The RIAA’s forensics experts found that Howell uninstalled KaZaA and deleted everything in the shared folder, reformatted his hard drive, downloaded and used a file-wiping program, and then nuked all the KaZaA logs on his PC. “Defendant’s intentional spoliation of computer evidence significantly prejudices Plaintiffs because it puts the most relevant evidence of their claim permanently beyond their reach,” argued the RIAA. “The deliberate destruction… by itself, compels the conclusion that such evidence supported Plaintiffs’ case.”

Ok so lets forget about legal proceedings, lets talk about privacy.  Say you just wanted to erase your data on your drive before you sold it to someone because you had company informtion on it, or your financials.  Don’t format and use some program like that.  Format it and then write 00000’s to the drive.  Not only that, if you’re selling the computer and you have sensitive information do what all government institutions do: Destroy the drive.  Cause really, do you want this to happen?

Tags: atlantic v. howell, consumer, drive, hard, privacy, RIAA, Sucks
Posted in news |

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