IP Addresses Not Enough To ID Users 266
phaedrus5001, with his first accepted story, points out an article at Ars Technica from which he's excerpted a chunk relevant to nearly anyone with an internet connection: "A file-sharing lawyer admitted this week that IP addresses don't by themselves identify someone accused of sharing copyrighted material online. To figure out who actually shared the pornographic movie at the center of the case, lawyer Brett Gibbs of Steele Hansmeier LLC told the judge (PDF) he would need to search every computer in the subscriber's household."
Re:Bad news bears. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, we can hope, sanity will prevail and it will more or less come down to "you don't have enough information to tell us who to look for, and you can't just go on a fishing expedition to look for computers that might be the one you think it is".
This is mostly about someone using information which the rest of us have always known was insufficient, using that to get far enough to identify someone, and then deciding they need to look at any computer within a 5 mile radius just in case it was them.
Their "evidence" gets weaker every time they try to say "we need to look at more because the last one wasn't enough". They're also at the discovery phase, which basically means they don't have enough evidence to know if they should be proceeding.
And, unless someone makes it illegal to have an open wifi, you can't go around saying that there is any contributory negligence or anything like that.
IP address proves nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Although this is won't work with DSL because of PPOE login, with a cable modem your IP address is not proof of anything.
Why? DHCP is not the only game in town. On many networks, you can take a DHCP-assigned address and determine the appropriate subnet mask, default route, and DNS server. But nothing really stops you from manually overriding the IP address, as long as you choose one in the same subnet that happens to be unused at the moment. The ISP can make this a little more difficult by remembering the MAC address associated with each address, but there are workarounds for that too.
I became aware of this when my cable modem stopped working and the support technician discovered that my IP address was in use from someplace other than my house. In those days, all addressing was static. Some other customer had inadvertently (or deliberately) assumed my IP address. The tech gave me a new address assignment and everything worked. So whoever hijacked my IP address left the audit trail pointing to ME. The hijacker was (from an IP address perspective) invisible.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)