Hi， I am not an US citizen and I don't live in US. But I am interested to know how the case progress, because we have similar such cases in my country. :P But seriously, are they after the end-user or making the ISP responsible for their end-user ? while, I am not a lawyer, so what after they know who is using that broadband connection for that IP. So, they have identified the 80yr old, what next ? and what if i have a free-for-all wireless router in my house which anyone can tap on, which i regularly switch off during nighttime for energy saving reason. :) On 5/11/11 1:28 AM, Deepak Jain wrote:
A Federal Judge has decided to let the "U.S. Copyright Group" subpoena ISPs over 23,000 alleged downloads of some Sylvester Stallone movie I have never heard of; subpoenas are expected to go out this week.
I thought that there might be some interest in the list of these addresses :
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/05/expendibleipaddre sses.pdf This will stop when a 80+ yr old is taken to court over a download her 8 year old grandkid might have made when visiting for the weekend. The media will make the case that technologists can't.
For examples, see the RIAA's attempts and more recently the criminal investigations of child porn downloads from unsecured access points. From what I understand (or wildly guess) is that ISPs with remote diagnostic capabilities are being asked if their provided access point is secure or unsecure BEFORE they serve their warrants to avoid further embarrassments. [It'll probably take another 6 months and more goofs before they realize that customers are perfectly capable of poorly installing their own access points behind ISP provided gear].
The torrent stuff is fundamentally no different in that a single IP can and is shared by lots of people as common practice and the transient nature of it (e.g. airport access point, starbucks, etc) reasonably makes the lawyer's case much, much harder.
There is a real theft/crime here in many cases, but whether there is actually any value in prosecution of movie downloads will depend... but most likely, the outcome will be iMovies or similar and the movie industry will shrink the way the music industry has.
DJ