An IP Address Does Not Point To a Person, Judge Rules 293
AffidavitDonda writes with this excerpt from Torrentfreak:
"A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US 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. Among other things, Judge Baker cited a recent child porn case where the US authorities raided the wrong people, because the real offenders were piggybacking on their Wi-Fi connections. Using this example, the judge claims that several of the defendants in VPR's case may have nothing to do with the alleged offense either. ... Baker concludes by saying that his Court is not supporting a 'fishing expedition' for subscribers' details if there is no evidence that it has jurisdiction over the defendants."
Re:So slashdotters (Score:2, Informative)
What bad persons? *Really* bad persons launch all their bad stuff from hacked computers of ordinary people anyways. Or they're dumb not to do so.
Re:Finally!! (Score:4, Informative)
Note that having a IP==Computer also doesn't change the ruling from the Judges reasoning either, they did raid the right place, he did have that IP number when the offense was committed. Getting a new IP number every few hours from the ISP does *not* give you extra privacy and NAT does not give you any security.
And if you really want, there is the "get a random IPv6 address" option anyway.
Re:er this is a bit silly (Score:5, Informative)
Surely the police raided the right people, the owners of the wireless device that facilitated the downloading
Actually, it turned out the downloader had been downloading using half a dozen access points, and they eventually caught him by tracing back his login from where he had downloaded at a university through the U's secured wireless.
So the raid was not just worthless, it was a waste of time and involved the needless trampling and horrific treatment of innocent people.
In other words, whoever collected the "evidence" and authorized the raid were being a couple of lazy fuckasses, which we should never allow law enforcement to be, and which is why it's so important to enshrine into precedent that an IP address IS NOT A PERSON and should not be enough to authorize a raid.
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)
Pity this'll never survive through the appellate courts, since the MafiAA bought off all the appellate judges long ago.
All 687 of them? [wikipedia.org]
Re:An IP Address can be a person in some cases (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm...no. You were able to tie an IP address to a MAC address. A MAC address does not equal a person. Especially in the case of a wifi router being the MAC address you found, you have no idea who might have actually been directing the offending internet traffic.
Re:Finally!! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the recommended minimum subnet to allocate for ipv6 is /64 ..
And yes, that does mean you can host the whole internet on your next LAN. Several times.
To be exact, you'd have 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 adresses. (ref http://www.bind.com/?path=netmasks6 [bind.com] )
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnetwork#IPv6_subnetting [wikipedia.org]
An RFC 4291 compliant subnet always uses IPv6 addresses with 64 bits for the host portion. It therefore has a /64 routing prefix (128â'64 = the 64 most-significant bits). Although it is technically possible to use smaller subnets, they are impractical for local area networks networks based on Ethernet technology, because 64 bits are required for stateless address auto configuration. The Internet Engineering Task Force recommends to use /64 subnets even for point-to-point links, which consists of only the two hosts.
Re:1 Hurdle Down, A Few More to Go (Score:4, Informative)
It's quite rare for the Supremes to hear a case until contradictory rulings have been issued on the same subject by two separate Appellate Courts.
If this case is upheld in its own District, then you've pretty much got your contradictory Appellate Court rulings in place, which means that either the Supremes hear it and rule one way or the other, or the people in that particular Appellate Court District have got that ruling to fall back on forever....
Re:Commercial interests would love fixed IPv6 addr (Score:3, Informative)
advertisers would *love* to have user information tracked by static IP addresses and ideally even per-device MAC addresses that can be encoded into IPv6 addrs
But they already do have majority of that information. When you get your "dynamic" IP address, it is not really dynamic. It is quite static to the area you live in. Secondly, MAC address have no value. Thirdly, MAC addresses are NOT required to be part of IPv6 address - Windows 7 picks a random number, AFAIK.
On the other hand, static IP addresses allow users to actually participate in the internet as a network of peers. Skype, SIP, and ability to access your data remotely are all possible if you have static IP. Dynamic IP wrecks havoc on these protocol, irrespective of the counter measures deployed.
Static network assignments, like IPv6 /64, is the antithesis of provider-consumer model. Currently we have a broken internet, and there are people that fight any improvement simply because it means "change" and transfer of power to the end user.. It's almost like the media conglomerate is trying to spread misinformation..