“A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the ‘pay-up-or-else-schemes’ that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person.”
I will agree that an IP is not a person. However, in the US, most states can give a ticket to the owner of a vehicle even if no proof exists that they committed an offense. Parking tickets are always issued to the owner and they have to explain or pay!
Sadly the case takes reference to child porn. I just do not see how any civilization can exploit children and feel they have done good. Where are the victim’s rights? How are they less than any citizen’s rights? They should be more. Yes, you had better explain how your IP is being in the line up of thugs.
If someone steals my car and robs a bank they may end up looking at me first off. I may have to have a good alibi. You may be innocent but you may have to have some proof of it.
The vast amount of torrents are used for illegal downloading. The movie industry and the record industry deserve a fair days pay for a fair days labor. My guitar instructor does get some royalties from his bands but in the end they don’t add up enough to let him live an life of leisure. People in the movie industry from trash cleaners to the stars all deserve to be paid for their work. How is stealing from them somehow different than stealing from your brother or sister? In a global view and a karmic view is it wrong. It is bad karma to steal.
I think what the judge is getting at is that for the regular person it is more costly to defend yourself in an alleged internet copyright infringement, than compared to a more traditional alleged crime. Cunningly, most content producers are setting the damage amounts marginally higher than the cost of assembling a bare bones defense.
For instance compare hiring a computer forensics expert & attorney to reaching into your pocket to pull out a receipt to verify that you were here, with this person.
Traditionally, to solve a crime; some degree of work is required even to arise at the stage of having a suspect. A traditional analogy to the current method of prosecuting copyright offenders would be to say: “I know a stolen car was found on this block today – so all of the inhabitants of the block are going to jail for GTA unless they can prove otherwise.”
Yes, and of course this moves the onus from proof of guilt to proof of innocence, which is TOTALLY contrary to how our legal systems are supposed to work. The problem for authorities is that the very means they use to implicate someone in a cybercrime – to gather all of this very circumstantial evidence – can be used to defend the individual from that crime, because at the end of the day there is no actual PROOF unless there is an eyewitness, that is was any specific individual. Keyloggers, screen recorders, packet recorders – all prove nothing about an individual unless there is something that can specifically tie that individual to the recorded actions.
Heck, according to some major news sources this is the very reason the US killed Bin Laden in cold blood – because it was going to be too complicated to prove his guilt at a trial. So it would seem a single bullet solved that problem for them.
That being said, it’s also the case that on a daily basis court decisions are handed down based on so-called evidence that is at very best dubious, and incredibly circumstantial, so to a big degree the whole legal system is a joke anyway.
Which of the nine times that Osama bin Laden has been reported to have died is the correct one?
Use your favorite search engine to search for “Osama Bin Laden Pronounced Dead…For the Ninth Time”
In this particular case, the real reason the judge made this decision is because the plaintiff (essentially a copyright troll) was using IP addresses to subpoena ISPs for the identities of the alleged infringers which he has historically gone after with settlement options.
Since the alleged infringement is copyrighted porn downloaded via P2P filesharing – one can imagine a lot of people would rather settle than be outed publicly in court, even if they are there to prove they didn’t actually infringe. The judge felt that the use of IP addresses for such a purpose was not justifiable.
I’m not sure this particularly sets a precedent yet, but at least it’s one of the few cases so far where a judge has condemned the practice of accusing someone based on activity that has come from an IP address their ISP had assigned to them for some amount of time.
All this is pretty neat, but there’s a single problem.
If making a copy of your car’s registration plate was as easy as doing things behind the IP of someone else (read : installing some software + spending 1 hour or so configuring it), would you be comfortable with justice considering registration plates as a valid way to identify cars ? With the police coming to get you someday because some road killer which they didn’t manage to catch had the same registration plate as your car’s ?
I agree that people should be held accountable for their actions. But the IP address is simply not a safe way to do it. In fact, not even the MAC address is, as many networking cards offer the option to change it too nowadays (in fact, my brother tried it some time ago to “borrow” the neighbour’s MAC-filtered wifi when he couldn’t buy his own internet connection, using perfectly mundane hardware which was not bought specifically for this purpose).
One day, the core internet protocols may be modified to make sure that every computer is identified in a unique, non-spoofable way, just like houses are identified in such a way by their postal address. But as of today, there’s no safe scheme for identifying someone on the internet. The judge has acknowledged that.
Edited 2011-05-04 09:25 UTC
And that still doesn’t guarantee that mail sent/received from a given physical address was by the owner of said house…
So, again, this is circumstantial evidence at best.
Sure. But if I say that during yesterday night, I’ve heard noise coming from the 69 Pidgin Road at Bugbear City, the police knows precisely where this is and may start to investigate what happened there. IP addresses, to the contrary, contain no localisation information. Anyone can spoof them, so they are worthless data.
Now, if your point was that knowing from which computer data comes from is not the same as knowing from which user of that computer said data originates, I totally agree with that. But then, we still have got some useful information : we now know which computer is to blame, and may investigate its HDD and activity logs in an attempt to find out more. That’s already a first step, compared with trivially spoofable data which means nothing like an IP/MAC address…
Laws have consequences. Things are not always black and white.
If you loan your care to someone and they get a ticket – it might cost you $50. Did you actually commit the violation? No, but your property was involved and is used as evidence. You have 3 choices:
1. Pay the ticket. Costs you $50 and society incurs no additional expenses.
2. Fight the ticket and prove it wasn’t you. This requires showing up in court – it costs society in terms of the amount of money it takes to pay all those people involved with operating the court. There is clerical work, judges and other court staff, etc. If you spend an hour in court it costs society many multiples of your $50 to actually bother hearing you – but it is your right to fight such a ticket, your taxes pay these costs just like everyone else’s.
3. Ask whoever was driving your car to pay you back the $50.
1 is not justice, but it happens all the time. Both 2 and 3 have the same outcome, but 2 is extremely wasteful, and society has set up the system so that the path of least resistence is 3. Regardless, the consequences to any individual are purely financial ($50), and the worst case expense to society is probably a few hundred dollars. No ones reputation gets damaged, no one is financially broken, etc.
And then there is…
I don’t see how you can equate the two. Being wrongly accused in a child porn case is extremely damaging to an individual. People can lose jobs over this, careers, spouses, irreparably damaged personal relationships, etc.
I feel for the victims too, but that does not change the fact that the bar should be set higher for this. A wrongly accused person in such a case is ALSO a victim – and the damage is a whole lot more than $50. Whether fair our not, in the US anything involving child porn has a stigma associated with it that no amount of legal vindication can remove. If the police have evidence and want to question someone, they can (and do, all the time) simply ask privately. If they are concerned that doing so might damage their case because the suspect might destroy evidence – well then they might resort to an warrant or what not. But the evidence required to get such a warrant should be a whole lot more than just a log of an IP address somewhere (which is significantly less reliable than say the plate number of a car – at least people have to register for license plates)…
In the referenced case they didnt just “look” at the person – they raided their home… Being questioned and being raided are 2 very different things.
Copyright violation is not theft. It might be morally wrong, but that depends on your morals. It is, in some cases, legally wrong too. It is however absolutely not theft, and equating it to theft is deceitful (which is also morally wrong, depending on your morals). I refuse to even debate the issue with someone who equates it to stealing – your viewpoint is so skewed that there is no point…