Responding to criticisms that the Center for Copyright Information erred in its selection of a digital forensics firm chosen to evaluate its anti-piracy setup, the group behind “six strikes” now says it will choose a second entity.
Earlier this month, the CCI had chosen the company Stroz Friedberg to evaluate MarkMonitor, the software designed to see who’s downloading Game of Thrones episodes and Serbian-language techno remixes of Cory Doctorow’s latest Creative Commons tome.
Here’s the thing: TorrentFreak and others have pointed out that the New York-based, multimillion-dollar firm had previously been the RIAA’s lobbying firm from 2004 to 2009 to the tune of $637,000. One of the primary lobbyists on record was Beryl Howell, now a federal district court judge in Washington, DC.
At the time, this was no surprise to us—after all, the CCI is funded by the MPAA, the RIAA, and five major American ISPs. We didn’t really expect them to pick an auditing firm sanctioned by the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But to its credit, the CCI is now saying that it will pick a second company to re-examine the first evaluation of MarkMonitor.
“We are, however, sensitive to any appearance that Stroz lacks independence, and so CCI has decided to have another expert review Stroz’s initial evaluation of the content community’s processes,” wrote Jill Lesser, the CCI’s head, in a Tuesday blog post.
“We will be selecting the additional expert promptly and will make that information available. In addition, we believe that the report Stroz Friedberg has provided to us speaks for itself. Therefore, we will be releasing that report this week to enable interested parties to review it for themselves. As we have previously stated, CCI will periodically review the content community’s methodologies to ensure they operate with the accuracy and quality we expect and that consumers deserve.”
The CCI says it’s still in the process of finding this second firm.
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