WiFi Hotspots Elude RIAA Dragnet 400
mblase writes "A CNET News article discusses a problem the RIAA is having with its copyright enforcement strategy: public wireless hot spots. Normally, the RIAA notifies the ISP when a user is found to be violating their copyrights, but in this case, the ISP is powerless to do anything. Key quote: '...unless the administrator keeps detailed logs of everybody's account use - which is not required by law - she may well not know who was swapping files.' I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
Re:logging your wifi is a good idea... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:forced liability, coming soon to a lawyer near (Score:1, Informative)
They can prove I have logs, but they can't prove I ever LOOKED at the logs. ANd if I say I never saw the (alleged) filesharing, my deniability is back.
Re:Dynamic IP's Extra (Score:5, Informative)
About 95% of our customers were on dynamic IP dial-up accounts. If we were contacted to locate a user who was using a specific IP at a specific time, it would take all of 3 minutes to identify the user, duration of login, newsgroups accessed, pop3 mail access, phone number they dialed in from, and any other transactions that produced a line in the radius logs.
We are talking about a simple grep here, not a big search requiring many man hours like you guys make it seem. Sure, the logs are huge, but computers are fast these days.
These logs would archive on a raid array and be accessible for 90-120 days. After that, it would require a tape restore to locate them. Either way, it takes no time at all. There was usually a 365 day log attached to the user's billing information that kept track of time connected, access numbers utilized, etc for billing dispute purposes (ie. "I didn't use your services for 150 hours two months ago and I want my money back" BS people would try and pull).
Small ISPs have more trouble with this? Lord no, they have less users, thus logging requires less resources. I'd hate for my fellow geeks on here to think it actually requires a bunch of work to log properly, you should know this if you've ever been any type of admin. tsk tsk.
ISPs have to log this sort of thing for the sake of liability. If the FBI shows up wanting information about a users and you consistantly have no information for them, eventually they will hold you responsible for your user's crimes. That's how it works here in the states.