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US Court of Appeals: An IP Address Isn't Enough To Identify a Pirate (techspot.com)
A judge has ruled that copyright trolls need more than just an IP address if they want to go after copyright infringement. An IP is not enough proof to tie a person to a crime. From a report: In a win for privacy advocates and pirates, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an IP address alone is not enough to go after someone for alleged copyright infringement. They ruled that being the registered subscriber of an infringing IP address does not create a reasonable inference that the subscriber is also the infringer. The case began back in 2016 and has been playing out in the legal system ever since. The creators of the film "The Cobbler" alleged that Thomas Gonzales had illegally downloaded their movie and sued him for it. Gonzales was a Comcast subscriber and had set up his network with an open Wi-Fi access point. At some point, someone had used his network to download the movie and the film creators captured Gonzales's IP address. The judge stated that in order for a proper case, the copyright owners would need more than just an IP address.
Because of the open WiFi.
But what about a regular household with many different users including minors and a WPA2 protected network? Who are they going to sue?
Is it really reasonable to sue the account owner in such a case? Should the account owner have to keep internal logs in order to identify which kid did the copyright violation?
An open guest wifi restricted to nothing internal and rate limit it to say 64kbps up/64kbps down. Enough to have deniability, poor enough access that no one will use it. Obviously you have to have the right wifi equipment to restrict access to your main network as well as the rate limiting - like pfSense or Ubiquiti UniFi wifi for example, etc.
A little knowledge is a dangeous thing. You could have dozens of devices on a subnet all talking to each other (with Layer 3 information) ans they're all going to know each other's MAC and it wilk "survive". I think what you mean is: once a computer needs to talk outside of the subnet and sends packets to a router, the router will only preserve the IP and not the MAC of the sender. A router ties together subnets, but the MAC from everything relayed will be it's own.