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RIAA Files 532 Lawsuits
Like2Byte writes "The RIAA is at it again. This time, Yahoo! News is reporting that 532 file sharers' IP addresses are being submitted to the courts instead of their names because ISPs decline to name people and the courts previous blocks. Music lawyers filed the newest cases against 'John Doe' defendants -- identified only by their numeric Internet protocol addresses -- and expected to work through the courts to learn their names and where they live."
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Thats irrelevant. ISPs will know who had what IP and at what times.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
You can also check the EFF subpoena datatbase, for existing subpoenas, it's not updated with the new IP's yet but I'd imagine that'll happen pretty soon.
You can check that here
In point of fact, I know most do. I know several people who work in support or engineering for several ISPs and keeping such logs is not unusual. The existence of a given set of logs can almost be taken for granted, what you can't take for granted is how long such logs might be kept.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Every time there is a copyright related case, I have to take the time out of my day to explain to asshats like you that copyright infringement isn't theft. It is copyright infringement. They are different.
READ A BOOK!
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
The dhcp servier & radius server (PPP) are separate entities. More accurtately the dhcp Ip is linked to a MAC address - Once a dhcp lease expires (connection is terminated) the arp table is refreshed. I don't know how long other ISP's leave thier arp tables up - but my routers refresh every 20 minutes.
In order to tie any specific IP to a particular user the connection has to remain active and the lease on the IP cannot expire.
This is why some macintosh users were accused of running the kazza client - the IP in question was linked to the mac adress currently in the arp tables. I have never encountered an isp that logs thier arp tables. So the customer who gets slapped with the lawsuit may not have been the customer who was originally sharing mp3's.
The only time usernames would be used at all if some sort of radius authentication is required by the isp before a dhcp address is leased (pap - chap, whatever). The most common broadband technologies that use radius is PPPOE & PPP over ATM.
The majority of ISP's used bridged ethernet technologies that don't require radius authentication. The only way of matching an IP in that case is via mac address.
Many firewall / router products allow for mac address cloning - which essentially allows a user to change his or her mac adress. IANAL but if the corresponding mac adress was not found on an offenders network then the RIAA would have no case.
In either way - due to the fact that most residental broadband services only offer DHCP addresses - the method that the RIAA is using to identify thier victims is highly unreliable.
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
As a former ISP manager, I know that by the time a lawsuit would have come about our DHCP assignment logs would have been rotated out of storage. Any reasonable sized ISP would have far too much data to keep on hand to store something like that.
I almost fell off of my chair:
http://128.111.80.86/
Points to....wait for it.....
"Asset Protection at UCSB"
Too good to be true!!
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IANAL, of course, but I'm not sure this is right. As far as I know, under common law principles, ISPs cannot be presumamptively liable for the actions of their users...and I doubt the DMCA changes things in this regard.
Is there someone who actually knows with certainty the answer to this point? It is important for how this whole story will play out, methinks.