I know I already have a thread, but thought I would put special attention to this specific fact, as I have no idea how important having the hard drive is to prosecution by the RIAA, and I just received a copy of the repair ticket today.
I have a hardware repair ticket copy, dated 25 April 2007 stating in part:
HD is dead, won’t spin on TOL machine, backup not possible
Will this have any effect on the RIAA should they sue? Does it make it harder for them, or does it have no effect. Unlike those tampering with their HD after receipt of the letter clearly it will have no prejudicial affect on the judge, but might it help me in getting them to drop the suit?
It probably doesn’t matter. I am not familiar with how the RIAA gets its “evidence” that it threatens downloaders with, but I suspect that they are monitoring your music downloads.
My educated guess is the RIAA has a computer with songs on it. Your computer (hypothetically) connects to the RIAA owned computer, and downloads a song. The RIAA’s computer retains a record of the IP Address of your computer, upon which basis they locate and sue you.
Actually, they get on on the uploads, or rather, the potential uploads in the shared folder. Rather than wait for a request, they go out and try to download a popular song. If you are part of the network they then determine what other songs you have available, and use that as the basis of the suit.