An IP Address Does Not Point To a Person, Judge Rules

AffidavitDonda writes with this excerpt from Torrentfreak: "A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US may spell the end of the 'pay-up-or-else-schemes' that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person. Among other things, Judge Baker cited a recent child porn case where the US authorities raided the wrong people, because the real offenders were piggybacking on their Wi-Fi connections. Using this example, the judge claims that several of the defendants in VPR's case may have nothing to do with the alleged offense either. ... Baker concludes by saying that his Court is not supporting a 'fishing expedition' for subscribers' details if there is no evidence that it has jurisdiction over the defendants."

Comments

Re:Finally!!

[SockPuppetOfTheWeek]

Won't do a bit to prevent anyone from "sharing" their IP a la open wireless or a Tor exit node.

Commercial interests would love fixed IPv6 addrs

[billstewart]

There are several reasons ISPs would rather give you dynamic addresses - DHCP is easier than keeping track of address assignments, and it lets them charge you more if you care about static. (And most ISPs are planning 256 subnets per house, not just 256 host addresses.)

But the commercial interests who do advertising or who do geolocation or other tricks to sell to advertisers would *love* to have user information tracked by static IP addresses and ideally even per-device MAC addresses that can be encoded into IPv6 addrs, because that's better consumer data.

Re:1 Hurdle Down, A Few More to Go

[Lunix Nutcase]

Obviously, this won't be settled until it reaches the Supreme Court

Or the more likely scenario is the circuit court will strike down this judge and the case will be refused hearing by the Supreme Court.