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:Finally!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Won't do a bit to prevent anyone from "sharing" their IP a la open wireless or a Tor exit node.
Commercial interests would love fixed IPv6 addrs (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several reasons ISPs would rather give you dynamic addresses - DHCP is easier than keeping track of address assignments, and it lets them charge you more if you care about static. (And most ISPs are planning 256 subnets per house, not just 256 host addresses.)
But the commercial interests who do advertising or who do geolocation or other tricks to sell to 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, because that's better consumer data.
er this is a bit silly (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely the police raided the right people, the owners of the wireless device that facilitated the downloading. How they handled them after that however is debatable, but how would the police have been expected to solve the crime with out doing that?
Car analogy! If my car is caught on a video camera running over children, shouldn't they be allowed to go to the DMV with my license details, get my address and interview me?
Re:1 Hurdle Down, A Few More to Go (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously, this won't be settled until it reaches the Supreme Court
Or the more likely scenario is the circuit court will strike down this judge and the case will be refused hearing by the Supreme Court.
Re:Commercial interests would love fixed IPv6 addr (Score:2, Interesting)
Can you imagine the personal information gathering and targeted advertising you could do with fixed IPs?
Imagine how much Google and Apple could compile... the targeted ads they could send you... the lists they could make available for sale to advertisers...