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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?
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...
It's better to let 10 guilty men free than to put one innocent man behind bars.
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.
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..
(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)
Surely the police raided the right people, the owners of the wireless device that facilitated the downloading
Actually, it turned out the downloader had been downloading using half a dozen access points, and they eventually caught him by tracing back his login from where he had downloaded at a university through the U's secured wireless.
So the raid was not just worthless, it was a waste of time and involved the needless trampling and horrific treatment of innocent people.
In other words, whoever collected the "evidence" and authorized the raid were being a couple of lazy fuckasses, which we should never allow law enforcement to be, and which is why it's so important to enshrine into precedent that an IP address IS NOT A PERSON and should not be enough to authorize a raid.
Ummm...no. You were able to tie an IP address to a MAC address. A MAC address does not equal a person. Especially in the case of a wifi router being the MAC address you found, you have no idea who might have actually been directing the offending internet traffic.
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.