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RIAA Admits ISPs Have Misidentified "John Does"
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has sent out a letter to the ISPs telling them to stop making mistakes in identifying subscribers, and offering a 'Pre-Doe settlement option' — with a discount of '$1000 or more' — to their subscribers, if and only if the ISP agrees to preserve its logs for 180 days. Other interesting points in the letter (PDF): the RIAA will be launching a web site for 'early settlements,' www.p2plawsuits.com; the letter asks the ISPs to notify the RIAA if they have previously 'misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena' or become aware of 'technical information... that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients' subpoena'; it notes that ISPs have identified 'John Does' who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and it requests that ISPs furnish their underlying log files, not just names and addresses, when responding to RIAA subpoenas."
Ars Technica has some really in-depth coverage on the letter.
See, here's the thing. The RIAA is filing affidavits and suits based on the information they get from the ISP's. And the information that the ISP's have is fallable.
Contrary to the RIAA's apparent claim, it is NOT a legal requirement for ISP's to collect information to which they can swear on a stack of bibles is true to track all customer activity. Even if the RIAA subpoenas them. They are obligated to provide what information they have. It's the RIAA that's turning around and swearing before a court of law that what they have is true, without verifying it.
Basically, the RIAA has discovered it's overstated the evidence that they have before them, and have potentially committed perjury or at least violated procedural rules. So now they want to say it's all the ISP's fault, apparently for not collecting information they're not obligated to collect, and which RIAA has used in court as "proof" without knowing what it entails.
Do you even have the foggiest understanding of how the IP protocol works? You can't "alias" an IP address to make it look like you're coming from somewhere you can't. That's like saying, "I'm going to send a letter to you, but tell you I'm from New Jersey, and hope to God that the response finds its way back to London, England."
You want either a proxy or a tunnel, both of which exist.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Whoops, silly middle mouse button...
This is a civil, not criminal, matter. You're not innocent until proven guilty. The standard is the presumption of guilt. And they presume a lot.
I was skeptical until I actually saw it with my own eyes. What kind of genius works for them and pulls a bonehead move like that? Switch your nameservers and set up your own placeholder you lazy bastards. I wonder if the idea of pre-lawsuit settlement violates a GoDaddy TOS...
Registrant:
RIAA
14 8th Street NE
Washington, District of Columbia 20002
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: P2PLAWSUITS.COM
Created on: 23-Jan-07
Expires on: 23-Jan-10
Last Updated on:
Administrative Contact:
Lamy, Jonathan lkennedy@riaa.com
RIAA
14 8th Street NE
Washington, District of Columbia 20005
United States
(202) 775-0101
Technical Contact:
Lamy, Jonathan lkennedy@riaa.com
RIAA
14 8th Street NE
Washington, District of Columbia 20005
United States
(202) 775-0101
Domain servers in listed order:
PARK9.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK10.SECURESERVER.NET
Just as an FYI,
"So Rosa Parks should have stayed in the back of the bus?"
Rosa Parks sat in front of the bus, which was her legal right to do even at that time. A caucasian person got on the bus, and typically an African American would get up from their seat and give it to the caucasian person. Rosa Parks remained in her seat. The bus driver demanded that she move to the back of the bus, something she refused to do. It was a law that passengers listen to the instructions of the bus driver and this was the law that she broke.
But you're right, it was a form of protest to right a societal wrong.
jeff
They have one set of numbers for the stockholders, one set for the IRS and another for the public.
Nonsense. Can you say securities violation and/or tax fraud? If the numbers didn't jive, they'd be guilty of market manipulation. If you really believe they're doing that, go ahead and feel free to file a complaint and/or tip here.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Tor. JAP (www only). I2P.
I personally like JAP, though it only does WWW. The servers are in Germany, go to google.com and you get "Google Deutschland". It's the easiest of the three. Tor makes you set up something like Privoxy, not sure about I2P. For JAP, just start it (it's in Java and runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows) and point your browser's proxy settings to localhost:4001.
Tor has the advantage of letting you route anything through it. If you use it, don't be an asshole by using it for Bittorrent or anything else high bandwidth or illegal.
I personally like using JAP when at public access points, though for anything other than casual browsing I use OpenVPN and browse through my home network.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Don't confuse GROWTH of revenue with the AMOUNT of revenue. All those numbers mean is that their income wasn't GROWING at the same rate; it doesn't mean they had LESS income.
It's like if you grew 10 inches every day, then one day you only grew 9 inches -- that's a 10% drop in your GROWTH, but you didn't get any shorter; quite the contrary, you still got 9 inches taller that day.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think he means he's looking for a proxy server somewhere?
ARP poisoning of any kind only works on one network segment, not on the Internet. You can still be located to the network segment, and from the network segment probably located by tracing your MAC address.
"Relaying" is functionally the same as a proxy server, except that the proxy doesn't know they're a proxy.
As an AC said said above, NATs also doesn't help for hiding your location. Really, it's also, for this purpose, a proxy. The only difference is that you're probably close geographically to the gateway, which means you're also easier to locate.
Whether any of these methods are good enough entirely depends on your privacy needs, but none of them are very secure. You can't disguise your identity on the public Internet. Even proxy servers can be raided/subpeonead/hacked, exposing your identity. The only secure solutions are darknets using onion routing or similar.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Whoops, silly middle mouse button...
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. - from the Rosa Parks autobiography My Story
The story is actually much more involved than that as well. Rosa Parks was sitting in the blacks only section but when more white people got on the bus the driver moved the sign designating where blacks could sit back one row. He then told the four blacks in those seats to move, three of them did but Rosa Parks did not. I don't know if she thought it was going to bring ab out social change, but it seems pretty clear she had a point to prove.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.