Judge Says Vague IP-Address Evidence Not Enough For Subpoena

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We do not condone piracy in any way shape or form but it's about damn time the courts started making common sense rulings like this. It seems like everyone on the planet, with the exception of the court system, knows that relying on an IP address alone as evidence is just stupid but they do it on a regular basis. With any luck, this ruling will set precedence for future cases.

A California federal court has thrown up a roadblock for filmmakers who want to obtain the personal details of an alleged BitTorrent pirate. The judge refused to issue a subpoena, twice, because it's not clear if the rightsholder obtained the geolocation details at the time of the infringement or after the fact.
 
With the amount of money and time these guys must throw at attempting to prosecute pirates, they probably could have developed (and monetized) a means of efficiently and effectively distributing media that would have all but eliminated the problem.

I'd be curious to know how many people pirate HBO vs Netflix.
 
I wonder how much money they spend fighting this stuff vs. how much money they're actually losing due to piracy.

This dude stole a movie! Cool, let's spend millions of dollars now to attack him!
 
I wonder how much money they spend fighting this stuff vs. how much money they're actually losing due to piracy.

This dude stole a movie! Cool, let's spend millions of dollars now to attack him!

They probably count the millions spent to find and fight him as losses due to piracy.
 
Sure glad they don't know what a MAC address is.

It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Or perhaps ISPs don't know you MAC address -- not sure it survives going through a router. Any networking people wanna comment?
 
It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Or perhaps ISPs don't know you MAC address -- not sure it survives going through a router. Any networking people wanna comment?

The ISP knows the MAC and IP addresses of your modem, which is the basis for the subpoena.
 
I am dealing with a case like this now, criminal, but same thing. The issue is how do you reliably implicate a user over a line to a physical location, when that user could very well have been in another jurisdiction altogether via proxy. It can be very hard to prove either way after the fact.
 
Correction, not filmmakers but dirty dogs who say they are acting on behalf of filmmakers while only kicking back a few percent from the actual fines they collect.
 
It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Or perhaps ISPs don't know you MAC address -- not sure it survives going through a router. Any networking people wanna comment?

MAC addresses are incredibly easy to spoof. They survive through the router but it could be fake before it even gets there in the first place.

Even if you can tie evidence to a specific computer, that does not prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that you were the person who was using the computer at that time.
 
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