Copyright Law

Afternoon witnesses in Capitol v. Thomas-Rasset

By Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman

The first witness of Tuesday afternoon was Kevin Havemeier. Mr. Havemeier was in a relationship with the defendant for approximately one and a half years, including at the time of the alleged infringement.

Mr. Havemeier testified as to the fact that he saw and knew of only one computer in Thomas' home. He testified to having used it only once or twice to check e-mail. He testified that the computer was password proteted, so Jammie needed to log-on to the machine to allow him to use it. He testified that at one time Ms. Thomas gave him a burned compiliation CD, so she had the technical knowledge to produce it.

He was asked about defendant's hard drive and whether or not it had been replaced. He had trouble recalling some dates for events occuring over four years ago, so he used deposition testimony to try to recall dates. His tesimony eventually confirmed that the hard drive was replaced subsequent to the date of the alleged infringement, and also recalled a conversation with Ms. Thomas after she found out about the commencement of the recording industry action that there would be nothing on the drive, since it had been replaced.

He also testified as to Ms. Thomas' username of tereastarr that he knew she used for e-mail and other services.

On cross-examiniation the questions were fairly simple and boiled down to did she do it, to which he testified that he had no knowledge of her ever having done what Plaintiffs allege.

The next witness was Ryyan Maki, an employee of Best Buy/Geek Squad.

He was asked to go through exhibits relating to Best Buy's records of Ms. Thomas' computer repair. The machine was brought in with service notes indicating beep errors and that the machine would not POST on March 7th, 2005. A service technician determined the problem to be with the hard drive and it was replaced under a warranty by Best Buy on March 9th, 2005. He also testified that it is the standard procedure of Best Buy to return an old non-functioning hard drive to the customer. He indicated that there was nothing in the notes of the case to indicate that this did not occur, and that there would have been such a notation if the customer wanted something different with their disk (such as it being sent in for data recovery).

On cross-examination Mr. Maki was asked about records pertaining to Ms. Thomas' best buy purchses, which included several music CDs, both before and after the date of alleged infringment. The records indicated that Ms. Thomas had more contacts and purchases with best buy than in his estimation the average Best Buy Customer.

The next witness was Eric Stanley, who had previously been retained by the defense as an expert in the case. Mr. Stanley also examined Ms. Thomas' hard drive on which he found no evidence of KaZaA or other infringement. His questioning primarily pertained to timing issues, such as when the hard drive was replaced. He stated that based on information he had recieved from the defense he believed that the hard drive was replaced in January or February of 2004 (Mr. Stanley also had problems remembering dates, and referred to deposition testimony to recall this information). He discovered during his deposition that this was not the case, based his finding on the day of the deposition that the hard drive had a sticker on it indicating the date of manufacture was in late January of 2005. Based on that information he stated it was unlikely that the disk left the manufacturer, and made it all the way to be installed in Ms. Thomas' computer by February 21, 2005.

The next witness of the day was direct examination by Plaintiffs of Jammie Thomas. I will cover that testimony in the next post.

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Full post as published by Recording Industry vs The People on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).