parrhesia.com

John Young pointed out that the ND CA PACER site now has images online for the ND CA MPAA suit - I grabbed them, here they are for free. I skipped paying for the ADR order and the notification to the Copyright Office that suit had been filed. I don’t have time to monkey with an index page for that directory right now, but the files are there if anyone’s interested.

I haven’t seen any substantive discussion of the progress of the case, so here’s my 30-second version: the MPAA has sued 12 unnamed defendants (all SBC Internet customers, as I read the complaint) for distributing movies using P2P software. The defendands are sued as “john does”. The MPPA asked the court for permission to conduct discovery against SBC Internet to learn the identities of the 12 defendants, whose IP addresses are disclosed in the complaint. The judge granted permission for discovery from SBC against only the first defendant, discussing problems which arose in other DirectTV anti-piracy litigation.

So the MPAA has apparently filed suits across the country against P2P filesharers allegedly sharing copyrighted movies. MSNBC mentions that a suit has been filed in the Eastern District of Missouri (St. Louis) - the documents in the case are available via PACER. I downloaded the docs that looked marginally interesting and am making them available here to save everyone else having to pay $.07/page. Here’s the complaint, Exhibit A, the disclosure of corporate interests, the civil cover sheet, and the certificate of original filing.

One more link with lots of good data about how electronic voting systems work (or don’t) - this report prepared for the Ohio Secretary of State in December, 2003.

I sent this message to the ABA’s Solosez mailing list, a discussion group frequented by attorneys in solo practice and small firms - sometimes the discussion is about legal topics, other times it’s whatever’s on people’s minds. In this case, voting.

A few days later, my friend Andy sent me a link to the http://www.blackboxvoting.org site, discussing the potential for vote fraud and a giant FOIA/public records request the site’s operator(s) have sent to local voting officials looking for evidence of trouble or tampering in electronic voting.

I was curious about the electronic voting systems used here in Santa Clara County (Sequoia), and found a few links -

• Santa Clara County Grand Jury report re electronic voting
• Sequoia press release re Santa Clara County
• California Voter Foundation page re voting technology
• CA Secretary of State’s order decertifying electronic voting equipment for the 11/2/04 election unless certain procedures are used