Slashdot Mirror
This is How We Catch You Downloading
marto writes "All over Europe thousands of people are being threatened with court action for allegedly sharing games like Dream Pinball 3D on P2P networks. Now, documents obtained by TorrentFreak show details of the anti-piracy company's techniques for identifying alleged file-sharers on the internet and the gathering of claimed 'forensic quality' evidence for use in court cases."
Or these guys would be SOL.
Oh, wait...
Wow. That sounds like a challenge. Seems like somebody ignored the saying "It's hard to make a program foolproof because fools are so ingenious."
www.freenetproject.org
I thought they were sharing stuff like Final Fantasy XII, Quake 4, and other top tier titles.
Why minimize the initial act? Thousands of people are not being threatened over "dream pinball 3d".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's not illegal to offer a settlement if you do have cause.
... in my years as a software contractor I saw it all the time. I would imagine that judges are just as subject to it as anyone else. I had to tell my customers repeatedly that they can't trust the software until they've done end-to-end on it and know that the results are valid. Mistakes get made, people (even me!) screw up on occasion. As far as I'm concerned, log files spit out by a router or DSLAM shouldn't be admissible in court, certainly not as the primary evidence against someone. I wouldn't want my future dependent upon a few magnetic domains on a hard disk somewhere. Let the RIAA collect some actual evidence (say, a picture of me at my computer doing something illegal) and take me to court. ISP logs are a joke at best, or would be a joke if their use weren't unfairly injuring lot of people.
True, but on the other hand if you're going to be suing people on the scale that the RIAA has been suing people, your evidence had better be pretty solid or you're treading on thin ice. Judges are starting to wake up to what the RIAA is doing, and I hope that trend continues.
All of these defenses rely on evidence you bring yourself, there's no official log anywhere to back you up.
Also true, but there's no "official" evidence to back up their claims either, which is the crux of the matter. And no, the information ISPs record hardly qualifies as an official log. Those are typically for provisioning, diagnostic and statistical use, and are not intended to serve as evidence against their own customers. Nor does a screenshot from Kazaa showing a list of IP addresses count as strong evidence.
The chain of evidence is pretty weak, given that they're depending upon data that was not recorded with the intent of being used in court, isn't particularly reliable anyway, and is subject to human mishandling outside any forensic chain established by the courts, and isn't guaranteed to point to the actual "criminal" in any event! The problem here is the (unfortunate) human tendency to accept information generated by a machine that you don't understand as being valid, when there's a substantial chance that it isn't.
That effect is very real
It's not as if there's some official Federal standard in place for ISP data monitoring that would be guaranteed to hold up in court so long as the ISP could be shown to be upholding the standard. I can guarantee that ISPs wouldn't want such a standard because it would cost them a fortune.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oh I wish we did live in such a world, really, I'm not kidding, it would be great.
However you could find yourself arrested, your equipment seized, and stories in the newspaper before anyone had time to believe that is wasn't you who did it, if they ever did.
Sharing is a good thing, but unconditional sharing a net connection without checks of any kind is asking for your generosity to be abused.