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Innocent File-Sharers Could Appear Guilty?

Posted by simoniker on from the honest-it-wasn't-me-guvnor dept.

daveo0331 writes " New Scientist has an article about what could be a promising defense strategy for people targeted by the RIAA. Basically, anyone on the Gnutella network can frame other users by making it look like someone is hosting RIAA music, even though they're not. Therefore, the RIAA's "evidence" against file sharers is theoretically unreliable and wouldn't stand as good a chance of holding up in court. No mention of whether this has anything to do with the RIAA's eagerness to settle the lawsuits out of court. The article is based on a research paper (PDF link, HTML version) posted anonymously to a web hosting service in Australia."

7 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. This may have happened already by l810c · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Read about this in USAToday Monday:

    A number of people say they were wrongly accused by the RIAA, or that their children swapped music without their knowledge. The RIAA dropped one suit, against retired Boston teacher Sarah Ward, 66, when it was discovered she couldn't be sharing songs on pirate service Kazaa because she uses an incompatible Apple computer.

  2. What about the obvious DHCP issue? by Shawn+Parr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When using a modem, or even Cable/DSL one is typically dynamically assigned an address. Many times these can change. It was stated in numerous articles that the RIAA found IP addresses for people, then subpoenaed ISPs for the users using those addresses.

    Either due to ISP incomprehension, or RIAA non-specific requests, they most likely received a lot of information based on who was using that address after subpoena, not during copyright infringement.

    --
    Shawn's Tech Articles
    1. Re:What about the obvious DHCP issue? by EverDense · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ISPs that are serious about protecting customer privacy will simply quit keeping these records.

      ...and Customer's that are serious about protecting their own privacy will quit the ISPs that don't.

      --
      http://jesus.everdense.com/
    2. Re:What about the obvious DHCP issue? by Pathwalker · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ISPs that are serious about protecting customer privacy will simply quit keeping these records.

      And spammers will flock to them in droves.

      After all, if the ISP has no record linking Time and IP Address to a customer, then there is no way to know who sent the spam...

  3. Even worse (or better?) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Furthermore, a worm/trojan could be released that secretly installs a Gnutella client and ACTUALLY downloads some tunes. Would ignorance be an excuse, when suddenly every computer in the world is filesharing? Tell you what, if I did fileshare copyrighted material, I would put up a fight.

  4. A Question by bogie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Someone already sort of asked this but they are modded at 0 and thus might not get heard that easily. I was wondering if anyone had a breakdown of just what P2P networking the RIAA is targetting. If you read the headlines all you would think is that this is between the RIAA and Kazaa. I remember when recently when we all joked about the actual kazaa names people were using and how many "kazaalite" users there would be.

    So what's the deal? Any WinMX, EDonkey, Bittorrent users being attacked in this recent spat of 700 cases by the RIAA. Or is it just those Kazaa users?

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
  5. Re:Innocent? Filesharing? by plenTpak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    i currently share 976 free songs (~3.58 GB), legally. i got all these songs off of iRATE. so i'd say you certainly can!

    i think irate is great by the way, although there's certainly room for improvement (p2p support, perhaps, as well as integration with an external media player). maybe when i have time i'll sit down and (attempt to) throw something together... (hopefully someone will have done it by then, and i can just download it. =P)