Judge Dismisses Movie Piracy Case, IP-Address Doesn't Prove Anything (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In what's believed to be a first of its kind ruling, a federal court in Oregon has dismissed a direct infringement complaint against an alleged movie pirate from the outset. According to the judge, linking an IP-address to a pirated download is not enough to prove direct copyright infringement. In the Oregon District Court, Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman recently recommended dismissal of a complaint filed by the makers of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler. According to the Judge both claims of direct and indirect infringement were not sufficient for the case to continue. What's unique in this case, is that the direct infringement claims were dismissed sua sponte, which hasn't happened before. To prove direct infringement copyright holders merely have to make it "plausible" that a defendant, Thomas Gonzales in this case, is indeed the copyright infringer. This is traditionally done by pointing out that the IP-address is directly linked to the defendant's Internet connection, for example. However, according to Judge Beckerman this is not enough. In response to community backlash, Oculus has decided to change its DRM policy (again) to allow HTC Vive games to play on the Oculus Rift virtual-reality system.

Comments

Why doesn't an IP address prove something?

[goombah99]

If a custom painted car used in a bank robbery is caught on film, and later found in your garage with matching plates, and it is liscened to you and driven by you on a daily basis, it seems like this might be relevant. Yes it is possible someone could have stolen it for a while and returned it without any signs it was stolen. But it seems like it's still pretty good evidence to build a case on.

Re:Why doesn't an IP address prove something?

[rickb928]

Yes it might be.

But if you trade cars every 3 months, and the burglary occurred a day after you traded for it, that makes it potentially a bit complicated.

And of course, you bought it used, so do we want to try and figure out whether the previous owner was responsible? Oh, wait, we don't know who they are, because there are no records. But even if they were, continue...

And, to complete the scenario, because you weren't paying attention to the known flaw in the keyless entry, someone has been driving your car off and on when you were asleep/drunk/working, and you don't know. Hell, once they drove it around WHILE YOU WERE IN THE CAR AND NO ONE COULD TELL BECAUSE THEY WERE DRIVING AN EXACT COPY.

Your garage door isn't an impediment. The crooks can throw dice to choose which way to defeat that layer of security.

Between DHCP and WiFi hijacking, MAC spoofing and general tomfoolery, IP addresses are mostly useless for figuring out who did what. The copyright holders should give up now, or serialize every single copy of everything. Ha.

Re:Why doesn't an IP address prove something?

[link-error]

... and what if your computer/router is setup to automatically create the VPN connection... My 5 year old could be on that VPN.

The driver did it. VPNs mean nothing.

[gavron]

If you have to post your resumé to make a point on /. then you've already lost.
OB Resumé thing: Yeah, I have that same experience, so we probably know of each other. Say hi to Nate or Dave for me.

When stopped for a moving violation in a car, the DRIVER is responsible. The OWNER doesn't get the citation; the DRIVER DOES.

VPNs don't necessarily require a user-entered password, can be bought and used automatically
without the user "entering authentication" (other than installing the initial file containing credentials),
include site-to-site VPNs that don't have per-user credentials, but most importantly to THIS discussion
PROVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING because:

The DRIVER of the Internet connection is the USER. The OWNER of the IP address is the ISP (or their ISP etc.) and they
lease it out to the CUSTOMER. The failure of these lawsuits is to link the CUSTOMER (car owner in the analogy) to the
USER (car driver in the analogy).

Having VPNs doesn't change the fundamental aspect that copyright trolls want the court to overlook:
The USER of the IP address is whom they want, but the OWNER of the IP address is whom they go after.
The more courts that wake up to this, the better.

E