An alleged file sharer targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who made the silly decision to destroy evidence by erasing his hard drive has lost his peer-to-peer lawsuit case. Jeffery Howell, who represented and defended himself with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was accused of using Kazaa to commit copyright infringement.
Judge Neil Wake said Howell willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence after he uninstalled Kazaa and then reformatted his hard drive. The RIAA said his intentional removal of evidence showed signs of intentional copyright infringement, and Judge Wake agreed. According to the RIAA, Howell successfully destroyed evidence four times once he received a prelitigation settlement letter from the music trade group.
Howell uninstalled Kazaa and removed all the content that was in his shared folder, reformatted the hard drive, removed all Kazaa logs from his computer, and used a file-wiping program to further ensure there wouldn't be evidence left behind.
Even though he won in April after the court determined the RIAA didn't show enough evidence that he infringed on the copyrights of 42 songs, even though he admitted that he installed the software on his computer.
It is still unknown how much money Howell will have to pay to the RIAA, or if he'll even be able to pay any money to the RIAA.
Horrible move by the defendant!
I can understand the desperation to try and hide and delete the HDD, but come on, the RIAA was handed its ... in the April court ruling! Now they get a default victory where Howell will have to fork over the cash!
Serves him right. Twat. Formatting is dumb. Uninstall and use CCleaner and something like Resplendant Registrar to remove all traces of Kazaa including any registry entries then Eraser to delete the MP3 files and do an Eraser HDD tips wipe. It will be like nothing was ever there and I doubt even forensic analysis would find anything.
He should not be charged with evidence tampering. He received complaints via mail. If I had been in his shoes, I would also have decided to stop file sharing.
Isn't that what the RIAA wanted him to do? Stop file sharing?
He did what any normal human would do. It would only be destruction of evidence if the computer had been sezied and entered into evidence in a court of law. It was not seized, and no order was given him that he should not erase his hard drive.
The RIAA does NOT have a case according to my father, who is a Federal judge. He laughed when I told him about this, and said the RIAA is fighting a losing battle and is only going to cause people to download even more music to get back at the RIAA and it's Gestapo tactics.
Actually "goober" he was ordered not to by the judge and did it anyway
If he had already won, what evidence was there to delete? There's a lot if info missing from this story. Also, if I were to receive a complaint about something I did during the Kazaa days, the evidence would be long gone, none of the drives I used then has survived without reformatting several times in the interval. Hell, if it had Kazaa installed I would've nuked it and reinstalled rather than wasting the time trying to remove Kazaa's mess.
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