RIAA wins case after defendant deletes evidence

[Randomus]

I just posted the article RIAA wins case after defendant deletes evidence.

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...

Read the full article here:  [http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/14979-RIAA-wins-case-after-defendant-deletes-evidence.html](http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/14979-RIAA-wins-case-after-defendant-deletes-evidence.html)

Feel free to add your comments below. 

Please note that the reactions from the complete site will be synched below.

[Randomus]

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!

[DeadMan]

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.

[guest]

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.

[guest]

Actually “goober” he was ordered not to by the judge and did it anyway

[dentman42]

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.