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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."
Pity this'll never survive through the appellate courts, since the MafiAA bought off all the appellate judges long ago.
Obviously, this won't be settled until it reaches the Supreme Court, but it's a vital 1st step. Go Freedom!
...where Judges are applying an understanding of the technical issues, common sense, and considering the situation of ordinary citizens?
Finally a reason for people to get fixed IP addresses. IPv6 of course - preferably at least 256 per house. Most commercial interests don't want this, but if the **AA want if maybe it will actually happen :-)
THIS is the evil universe!
What bad persons? *Really* bad persons launch all their bad stuff from hacked computers of ordinary people anyways. Or they're dumb not to do so.
Wait, you mean the police might have to do actual police work rather than relying on shoddy "evidence" that doesn't point to the right place, raiding innocent people's houses, trampling all over civil liberties...
Gee. I must be insane to think we could agree that the cops should be required to do their due diligence...
What do you propose we do to continue enforcement against these pieces of human waste? What if you can no longer get a warrant based on an IP?
Uh, get more evidence? The IP could be used as a starting point, but shouldn't be used as the only reason to kick down doors.
It's better to let 10 guilty men free than to put one innocent man behind bars.
I'll bite. If you're doing something that bad, as in 'criminal trial' bad the police are involved. They can get warrants, do observation, and build a case on more than an IP. It won't stop them, if anything it forces them to build a stronger case that will lead to a guilty verdict or to the target never being indicted in the first place.
I'm not one to trumpet common sense (because it usually isn't as common as we think), but I'm here to play you all a song on my trumpet.
Now if we can eliminate speeding tickets based on license plate numbers...
One thing is for sure, if someone wants to really hide behind a computer, he can. Unless the investigation team has influence beyond national borders.
In the case of a static IP address and a locked down router would that not be enough circumstantial evidence to convict? While I applaud this ruling still I think a jury or judge could be swayed by a good prosecutor pointing to those two factors. Ummthat and your 1200 titles movie collection on home burned DVD’s.
I'm thinking of this scenario:
Say the police have some sort of evidence that a person is sharing illegal material, such as a torrent containing child.. material. Previously the IP probably would have been enough to get a warrant to search the premises.
If that isn't probable cause anymore, how exactly are they supposed to catch this person?
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So let me get this straight. You're saying, because crap evidence can be used to nail child pornographers, the fact that it's crap evidence ought to be overlooked?
I don't think anyone is saying outright that an IP address can't be used to determine if someone at a specific geographical location is doing bad things. But rather than being some absolute identifier like RIAA and the MPAA have for so long claimed, it's more like blood tests in the pre-DNA days, a way of narrowing things down, but not in and of itself sufficient evidence to indicate wrongdoing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wait for them to steal something that has actual value.
I'm pretty sure they could still get a warrant to track down the person who had used one IP (or a reasonably small number). Shot-gunning a few hundred thousand of them is out of the question.
IP always equals person, just not always the right person. But if you utilize some common sense it's still a worthwhile lead; at that step of the journey there's a better-than-average chance that even if it's the wrong guy he could be able to help you. If anything, this should make sure that law enforcement doesn't go doing stupid stuff like breaking down doors before they make sure that the IP = person was the right person. Suppose they do have an open wireless - chances are the person you're looking to connects to it pretty regularly. Triangulate and you have him. But don't just go knocking down the homeowner's door. Can judges award subpoenas with stipulations on how they're used, or is it up to the cops to show some common sense?
Wait, you mean the police might have to do actual police work rather than relying on shoddy "evidence" that doesn't point to the right place, raiding innocent people's houses, trampling all over civil liberties...
Gee. I must be insane to think we could agree that the cops should be required to do their due diligence...
Good thing the only thing in the courts are criminal cases and nobody ever has to bring a civial suit.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Immoral perhaps, but no.
What's exactly immoral in helping musical lobbies struggle to maintain their golden ass(ets) instead of letting people choose to - actually - support their favourite artists directly (i.e.: merchandise, digital releases, live shows and so on) ?!? It works - ask Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails to name a few - and sure they won't miss their legacy major. It also have a nice side effect: more lawyers on child porn users instead of 10-years-old "copyright infringers" as it should be in a normal place.
This ruling affects the ability of corporations/lawyers using subpoenas to identify individuals for civil suits when the only evidence is an IP address that they are equating to a John Doe. Cops requesting a subpoena for ISP details so that they have probable cause to get a search warrant which in turn *may* lead to hard evidence that will allow prosecution is a completely different manner and shouldn't (in theory) be affected by this precedent.
Disclaimer: IANAL
It wouldn't be probable cause for a warrantless search, but it would be enough for a bench warrant or enough to justify further actions. Perhaps something as complicated as stopping near the residence and checking to see if they have an open wireless AP.
World isn't ready for that: Voltaire died 200 years ago and people is still trying to deal with his works, let them have their time..
Surely the police raided the right people, the owners of the wireless device that facilitated the downloading. How they handled them after that however is debatable, but how would the police have been expected to solve the crime with out doing that?
Car analogy! If my car is caught on a video camera running over children, shouldn't they be allowed to go to the DMV with my license details, get my address and interview me?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
You mean like "civil suits" where the MafiAA are using unlicensed, illegal "investigators"?
It's better that 9999 guilty bad guys go free instead of 1 innocent be subject to a no-knock raid and arrest due to faulty information.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Everyone knows that only Corporations are People and the users who download data (aka consumers) are more correctly described as Serfs.
or Peasants.
choose one, but the US Supreme Court says only Corporations are People.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
(Should I feed the troll? Awww, c'mon, it'll be fun!)
An IPv4 address typically identifies a single household, not a single individual.
And while sometimes the activity that leads to a search warrant based on an IP address rates the term "pieces of human waste", it's usually not child pornography, it's usually just music or movie downloading, and maybe the person trying to have sex with the "13-year-old girl" in the chat room is actually the 13-year-old teenage boy in the household, not the 40-year-old adult who's paying for the IP address.
Getting a warrant for a guns-drawn SWAT raid should require an extremely high amount of certainty and a lot of information about the suspect, not just the simple "we've seen him dealing weed and don't want him flushing it" level. Even a warrant for a normal polite knock on the door by an officer with a search warrant or arrest warrant ought to require higher standards than police have been getting away with lately, and if the alleged "crime" is "copyright violation", that's something that ought to be dealt with by a process server, not a cop.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But this probably will close the door on the 99 cases out of 100 where an IP actually does equal a bad person who needs to be caught.
I'm not sure about the 99/100 figure. However, even if that's true, I'd argue that just because something is a 99% accurate indicator of crime, it doesn't justify a forfeiture of rights for the other 1%. Is having an IP address linked to an illegal activity justification to open an investigation? Sure. Enough to break in and confiscate property of an individual who has an open WAP living in a populated area? Probably not. Keep in mind people committing internet crimes are "crafty" and know that its important to hide their own identities (often, masking them as the identities of others)
I agree that IP != person is a good ruling.
But this probably will close the door on the 99 cases out of 100 where an IP actually does equal a bad person who needs to be caught.
Unless you have something to back up the "99 cases out of 100" figure, we'll just throw that out off-hand as a WAG to draw attention your point. The real point is what do we do to catch Bad People. Build a case on more than an IP address. A case is not built on a street address. Nor is a case based on a license plate number. And these are much more static in nature than IP addresses. While all this might be part of a the chain that leads to an arrest and consequently part of the case, it's going to take more than just that to identify and prosecute.
>What if you can no longer get a warrant based on an IP?
This is only saying a business can't subpoena private details of another private party on IP alone, I don't know how that would apply to a warrant. I assume the RIAA, could still use IP data to have a investigation opened by the police, and they could get a further search warrant that could allow a address given to the police... I would think a warrant for the address to be given to police would have a lower burden than for a private party. I hope it was learned to not use IP alone as a reason to grant a smash and grab raid warrant, but only to get contact information to continue the investigation perhaps by contacting the owner of equipment, to gather more evidence. They probably could have caught the actual perv, had they quietly contacted the home owner, and started logging that homeowners Wifi info... Once they smashed the innocent owners place in, shutting down the network, announcing to everyone within 100* the maximum wifi range they had "caught the perv". I suspect it was too late then to gather any more data on the actual perp.
I don't think this ruling applies to normal police work.
from the order:
"the imprimatur of this court will not be used toadvance a “fishing expedition by means of a perversion of the purpose and intent” of classactions."
The police can still get the address of the suspect and than do some their job by observation to collect evidence. I think if they can proof, that the suspect is at home every time the IP was used for some criminal activity, this would be enough.
When the ISP I worked for used to get "Notices of Infringement" from copyright holders, I was the one tasked with finding the user who was responsible for the infringement. We would get an IP Address and a timestamp along with the name of the copyrighted material. Since we kept log files for our DHCP server, I was able to tie an IP Address to a MAC Address at the time of the infringement. I was then able to look at the arp cache of our router and tie that MAC Address to a PVC. Once I got the PVC, I tied that back to a DSLAM or SLID which in every case was tied to a specific customer. In almost every case we identified the correct user. There were a few cases where we were unable to find the infringing Mac Address in the arp cache probably because the device was no longer in use.
Can you imagine the personal information gathering and targeted advertising you could do with fixed IPs?
Imagine how much Google and Apple could compile... the targeted ads they could send you... the lists they could make available for sale to advertisers...
A ruling that makes sense from a judge that bothered to learn something about technology. These days, most basic broadband connections have dynamic IP addresses which means, hello, that they change. Any broadband subscriber could have had that address at a given time depending upon if a router or computer was rebooted.
-Sigh-
modded troll?
I was honestly not trolling. I just wanted to discuss was the unintended consequences might be of this ruling.
Why do people have to mod you "troll" just for asking the question? I honestly wanted the answer.
You might like the conclusion of the order, but unfortunately the judge failed to include legal support for his arguments (citing an msnbc article does not count). He also leaves no avenue for copyright holders to get the names of the account holders--he just speculates on possible defenses for the defendants, moans about the difficulty of defending a federal lawsuit, and then denies discovery. This is not the model ruling pirates have been waiting for--there is no way this order stands up on appeal.
One fine day when the cops break your door down without warning, "drive stun" your crotch with a Taser and then destroy everything in your house (including the sheet rock, carpets, and floorboards) because as far as they're concerned, you are a "piece of human waste" and it's good enough for you, remember that you advocated that IP address=personal identity.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for compensation, an apology, or even a note to your neighbors that you're not actually a perv, because you'll get none of that without a years long bankrupting court battle.
Or, we could simply insist that they do actual followup police work to see if there's a GOOD reason to believe they have the right person first. They can look for things like financial transactions between the suspect and a known bad guy, or physical evidence of the crime taking place. If they find none of that, they should just move on. If they DO find it, then I'm sure a judge will be glad to sign the appropriate warrants.
Surveillance. Any contact with children? Does any of it look inappropriate? Look at financial transactions. Any payment to known pornographers or their agents?
While I don't condone in the trading of such items, I do have to say the legal system fighting the images does more harm then good. The actual abusers of the stuff (IE the ones actually taking the pictures, harming children etc...) are rarely targeted, while ones who actually trade the images after the fact, whether intentionally or by accident (accidentally finding an image posted on a forum, then having it in your cache is considered possession) are persecuted way beyond necessity. Heck people are going to jail for the rest of their lives over drawn pictures, manga collections etc... Putting a stop to the moronic abuses of the law is something for me to oppose.
I dislike these 'pay-up-or-else-schemes' as much as anybody else. But in shouldn't each ISP customer be accountable for what happens on their connection? If you decide to share the connection with your family/friends/neighbours it's your job to ensure that they don't abuse it. Otherwise anyone could set up an open wifi and deny any responsibilities for what happens on the connection...
...doesnt point to a person yet... Just wait till they start coding your DNA to an IP address... (putting back on my tinfoil hat)
Joe Investor
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
But they already do have majority of that information. When you get your "dynamic" IP address, it is not really dynamic. It is quite static to the area you live in. Secondly, MAC address have no value. Thirdly, MAC addresses are NOT required to be part of IPv6 address - Windows 7 picks a random number, AFAIK.
On the other hand, static IP addresses allow users to actually participate in the internet as a network of peers. Skype, SIP, and ability to access your data remotely are all possible if you have static IP. Dynamic IP wrecks havoc on these protocol, irrespective of the counter measures deployed.
Static network assignments, like IPv6 /64, is the antithesis of provider-consumer model. Currently we have a broken internet, and there are people that fight any improvement simply because it means "change" and transfer of power to the end user.. It's almost like the media conglomerate is trying to spread misinformation..
The wrong person's door getting kicked down is not good, but you'll accept it anyway?
Who the hell are you to decide whether or not its acceptable, as an innocent in a FREE society, to be treated in such a matter as this? Yes it makes it harder for the good guys to catch the bad guys but thats how it will ALWAYS be.
Law enforcement will always be at a disadvantage because criminals, by definition, have already decided they don't have to play by the rules. Courts, judges, and cops are restricted by things called laws--and for good reason. If cops and criminals don't have to abide by rules, whats the difference between the two?.
I like cops, and would like to differentiate them from the criminals. Rulings like this make it easier for me to hold law enforcement in high regard.
I just found an interesting blog post on this topic: http://www.christopher-parsons.com/blog/technology/ipv6-and-the-future-of-privacy/
To get you interested here's a snippet:
Fortunately, the good engineers that develop Internet Protocols were aware of the potentially devastating consequences that static IP addresses for each device would have on anonymity online and, as a result, privacy. The Internet Protocol next generation (IPng) working group crafted a solution that involved creating;
pseudorandom interface identifiers and temporary addresses using an algorithm The temporary address would not derive from a completely random generation process, which might result in two computers generating the same number, but instead would produce a temporary pseudo-random sequence dependent on both the globally unique serial number and a random component. The number would be globally unique because it would derive from the interface identifier and from the history of previously generated addresses, but would be difficult for an external node to reverse engineer to determine the source computer. [3]
In layman’s terms, this means that the engineers responsible for IPv6 were mindful of the surveillance capacities of the new Internet Protocol, and built privacy into a system that would otherwise lend itself to surveillance and authoritarian tendencies. The catch, however, is that is requires the parties responsible for assigning IP addresses to participate in the pseudo-anonymization process itself: it’s possible for ISPs to forcibly assign particular address to each and every device on their network.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Don't all those IP cases go through East Texas? So what's the appellate court for that?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Obvious reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Six_(The_Prisoner)#I_am_not_a_number.2C_I_am_a_free_man
My printer's IP doesn't represent a person.
It either represents no-one, or everyone with rights to access it. Either way it disproves the hypothesis that IP == person.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
How do you classify an automated bot net with your proposition (one person -> (exist-at-least one IP)) && (one ip -> (exist-at-least one person)) true ) ?
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Hmmm, gross generalization, mis-characterization? Or funny, and intended to be witty? [if the former, pleases for the love of god, basic set theory makes your generalizations false by design]
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Those circuits (both state and federal) are very popular for corporations of all sorts. The federal is the 5th Circuit.
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"I'd rather let 100 guilty men go free, than chase after them." --Clancy Wiggum
Yeah. I think we could catch lots of criminals by searching every house and apartment without a warrant. Let's start with yours. We wouldn't want those living turds to get away.
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A bit of both. Its intent was as a caricature. Fortunately, I wrote a Slashdot comment, not a formal mathematical proof, so I'm not particularly worried about set theory's incompatibility with exaggeration.
There are certainly a lot of Slashdot users who are generally sane and reasonable folks. However, there are enough people with biases to form a critical mass of bad mods and metamods. One post with careless wording offends someone, and gets marked as a troll. There's enough others who see it as a troll that that knee-jerking mod can get good metamod results, and can go on to jump to conclusions about other posts. Other users see the troll label, assume the post is trolling, and then read with biased eyes. As a result of Slashdot's entirely-crowdsourced modding system, biases never really go away.
I chose one particular bias to pick on for my caricature. There's lots of others. If you'll allow me to pick on another, I'll take a look at your signature. I personally have nothing to hide, and will gladly give up my privacy for fairly small (even some ideological) reasons. Try to force other people to give up their privacy without a damned good reason, and I'll fight it to the bitter end. Now, if I were to post the first half of my opinion in a discussion without the second half, you'd apparently think I'm a "goddamned idiot". Would you mod under the assumption that I'm either stupid or trolling?
Similarly, I get annoyed by heavily-slanted posts about how governments and corporations are evil. Post something saying that you understand a company's position, make a few decent points I hadn't thought of, and I'm likely to give an "insightful" mod. That's a bias, too. I intentionally never excluded myself from the community I talked about.
Effectively everyone in the community is biased in some way. That's okay. The original post in this thread was modded "troll" apparently because of these biases. The modding system certainly can't be perfect, but with so many different opinions, the system as a whole ends up in a pretty reasonable center. Slashdot's moderation system is the worst, except for all the others.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Maybe that's right. But police, once they have the address, has more option than blindly raiding the house. They could scan the network and see from where it's used and maybe even intercept the packages.
That would mean one more step for the police. And anyway, the main question was, if it's making police work impossible, what it doesn't, since police with evidence that a certain IP was clearly used for criminal activity would get the address and other data necessary to carry on their work.
Just you wait in a few years everyone will get his won ipv6 address on his birth certificate.
The "99 out of 100" was a bit trollish imho.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
"ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?" If that's a personal question maybe for being sacrilegeous?
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
Just read the Wikipedia entry on him - it states that he's strongly opposed to and form of Affirmative Action. Kind of hypocritical considering he was obviously selected to replace a retiring African-American judge to keep a quota.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Once in a while, a glimmer of sanity appears in our court system. Then it goes away, not to be seen again for years and years.
Anita stop the madness!!
Can you imagine the improved privacy offered when something like your FaceBook profile becomes an App running on your local wall-wart server that can only be accessed friends you choose (i.e. whitelist by IP)? How about the ability to make video phone calls directly to someones IP address without the need for any intermediary to make the connection? email server at home with no ISP storing and mining data or serving it to others? All of the real personal data becomes private. The only thing left is your surfing of public sites and downloading which can be tracked by IP. The really personal stuff gets to stay private.
It is good to see that Judges who are African-American (I hate that word...) can even see that Affirmative Action is racism. I had to explain this to a black coworker recently, and I don't think he understood even then. He thought it was perfectly fine that with less experience and training he was more likely to get a job then me, because I am a white male.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Can you imagine the personal information gathering and targeted advertising you could do with fixed IPs?
Imagine how much Google and Apple could compile... the targeted ads they could send you... the lists they could make available for sale to advertisers...
This would be fantastic. I prefer ads to be targeted to my interests. I find it to be much more useful than random ads for things I do not care about.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
You spelt 'curcus' wrong.
Lucky you corrected him then!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Democrats had the majority in the house and senate for years...
Both the democrats and the republicans are right-wing nutjobs. USA does not have two radically different parties, but two very smiliar ones. I have no idea why they're imagining that this is democratic but hey, it's their country. There are practically no left-wingers in the USA, just different varieties of right-wingers.
-- Linux user #369862
Most Circuit Courts of Appeal, although not the Seventh, have recognized that there is enough of a link between an IP address and an internet subscriber to at least provide probable cause to suspect the subscriber of online activity.
You can't successfully sue someone for probable cause to merely suspect. You have to get enough probable cause to reasonably be certain, and you can't shotgun a bunch of people with a lawsuit for mere suspicion. You have to find probable cause to believe that they did it on a case-by-case basis, which means you have to sue them all separately, at which point you'll be able to use reasonable measures to determine whether or not they were the person infringing. Which is exactly what they do not want to do, because they're lazy: they would much rather knowingly target a whole group including many innocent people and force them to have to prove their innocence on a case-by-case basis than they'd like to have to prove case-by-case that the guilty ones are guilty like they're supposed to have to do.
Affirmative action was a temporary solution to a problem that really had no other solution. The society had some built-in biases against minorities, and this was a way to tip the balance a little. For the longest time, and I'm sure to this day, there existed a bias for the white guy. If a hiring or admissions decision was a coin-flip, it went to the white guy. So, AA said it should go to the black guy for a while. I think we are getting close to a time when this is no longer necessary, however. Fairness is starting to grow in our society, and people in decision-making positions are less likely to have biases.
But you are correct in that AA had an unfortunate side-effect. Many implementations began to define quotas, and people started to get the idea that AA shouldn't just tip the coin-flip cases, but that it should reward group membership over competence.
However, clearly some racism exists when people STILL have to refer to Justice Thomas by his race. His opinion of AA has no more value because he is a black guy than anyone else's. Maybe when people can stop with the tokenism, we can stop AA.
I'm not sure what you are saying. The ISP should provide the /64 subnet to you, or you should have your own /64 subnet that you carry around irrespective of ISP? If it's the latter, good luck with the routing tables.
Windows does this, but only within the same /64 subnet - the network bits (typically /56 or /48) and the subnet bits (any more bits to get to /64) stay the same. IPv6 address privacy hides which computer on the subnet you're using (and because it's hiding the MAC address, also hides what manufacturer of Ethernet chip you have), but it's still giving away a lot of information, especially if you've got different subnets for wired and wireless networks (typical.) You could get fancy and modify DD-WRT to switch off the subnets you're using a bit, but they'll still be on your house's IPv6 network number.
The big win that you get from IPv6 address privacy is with laptops that you use at different locations - otherwise you'd be trackable as you move from home to Starbucks to work to the pub to that dodgy nightclub to your friend's party. (Of course, if you keep checking in with Foursquare and tweeting geotagged pictures, there's nothing IPv6 can do to help you, but it's not their problem.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A duty of proof exists in all cases. Short cuts for the convenience of any portion of society are not reasonable. This includes proof of who downloaded an item and should even apply to things like parking tickets where it is not know exactly who parked the car or failed to feed the meter.
I think you have that backward. A long as discrimination is sanctioned by the government (e.g., Affirmative Action), tokenism will never go away, because it can't.