Does this not mean that there are grounds for appeal in any number of MAFFIA cases,too? IYAAL, plz to weigh in, thx.
I could have sworn this was already precedent elsewhere…
http://techland.time.com/2012/05/07/you-are-not-an-ip-address-rules-judge/
I guess that means that the RIAA will be hitting up their NSA buddies for the toolkits to hijack i.p. cameras.
Nawty Comcast customer!
The kicker on this is that I’ve had comcast IPs display when I’m running a VPN like TunnelBear which entirely negates the idea that IP = identity. Comcast isn’t even a thing here in Oz.
Until we scrap the idea that an IP address is any more than a temporary “care-of” address for routing, we can’t use networks fully, we can’t share our networks, we can’t cross-connect them, and we can’t give access to this new air freely. I should be able to share access to my networks without fear of a 2AM jack-booting. Instead we have so much capacity going unused out of perfectly rational fears of being the target of irrational liability. It doesn’t help that we jump to blame each other and feel superior (“he should have known better than to leave his wireless open”…). People think they are being savvy by locking everything down. What we’re actually doing is painting everyone into a one-to-one addressing system that only benefits systems and industries that require one-to-one compliance, but that is not an Internet.
We have enough idle wireless coverage to make the cellular industry irrelevant. (We must like to pay twice.)
Judges need to articulate this non-equivalence much more strongly, outside of just the domain of copyright, if we want the Internet (and not just cable companies) to proliferate, and for us to realize it’s largely-latent benefits.
Nope. Something off about that comparison…
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You are pre-judging that a crime has taken place. The evidence of that is usually wanting in these kind of copyright troll cases too.
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Even supposing one could establish that an IP address was associated with probable copyright violation, why are you comparing it with armed robbery or whatever assault or life-threatening emergency results in “screams coming from some house address”?
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Since use of an IP address leaves no physical evidence, and wifi extends outside the walls, you can’t be sure that the internet connection was made by anyone inside the house.
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You can’t be sure which person inside the house was using the internet connection, for the same reason.
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Malware is always a possibility if the owners of the PC use Windows or exhibit other symptoms of poor judgement.
It’s actually pretty insubstantial evidence of a not particularly serious crime. The judge called it right IMO.
But a hop on the Internet is more like a rental car, or like cash. Sure,they all have unique IDs at the time of use, but I can’t make the assumption that the current user to control it has any correlation with past or future users, and restricting networks (or encouraging locked networks) to support that false assumption is a bad idea (global ID cards anyone?). Those restrictions have forced the design of networks that route all traffic through central points (arguably for our safety, but also negating the distributed nature of the Internet). I would not restrict the use of cash; freedom trumps safety, IMHO.
By centralizing the Internet we are making it fragile and useless. I should be able to create cross links with my neighbours, but your resolve - that my address stamp is near to guilt by association - prevents it, and is simply invalid. I should be able to run a Tor exit node from home, but I can’t - because I’m not that crazy. 
IPv6, for example, has such a large address space that people can just make up numbers under a prefix as part of stateless auto configuration. It is not fair to paint the controller of that prefix with the same brush as all the nodes on the network, but that’s basically what we are doing with IPv4 by assuming that the address of one NAT device is associated with the ultimate user. An IP address - a discardable pointer for the purpose of routing - is not specific enough to be used as evidence of wrongdoing, assuming there is any presumption of innocence today. It’s time to let it go as far as the law is concerned. It’s just not enough to infringe my right to provide service to my friends, family, and community. The costs of being a misanthrope are immeasurable.
Wait, they’re using GEOLOCATION SOFTWARE to try to prove that an IP address was assigned to the defendant? They’re not even using logs from the ISP? Oh man, that is just hilarious.
IPv6 has the power to change this paradigm since it becomes possible for every device to have a unique IP address. Though privacy extensions will help keep your device from being easily tracked, it is not without its own problems. The private connections have a limited duration so long term connections (movies, SSH, etc) will disconnect when the timeout is reached and a new session with a new temporary IPv6 address is used. Once the connection hits its max address limit, the privacy extensions are disabled and a traceable IP address is used.
Really? So when someone has an unlocked wireless router you can prove without a doubt who was using it at the time? That’s interesting.
License plates are worth investigating, but that’s circumstantial evidence, you need more than “your car was here” to prove they were involved.
It would take a little kernel hacking and would probably annoy any switch you connected to, but it would be possible for a machine to use a semi-unique IPv6 address for every connection. All of the addresses are going to have the same prefix however, so I’m not sure how much this helps.
An easier and more elegant solution would be to build a V6 to V6 NAT capability at the router that does it automatically.
An IPv4 to IPv6 transport relay translator at the network edge is my current solution. Most of us wont need more than 429,4967,296 unique addresses on a network, so I see no reason to move to IPv6 behind my WAN facing device.
So you have no interest in the restoration of end-to-end connectivity provided by global IPv6 addresses? If we re-invent NAT for IPv6, you’ll have to use techniques like STUN servers and UDP hole punching to make connections with people. P2P software will suffer without end-to-end addressability.
Geolocation software puts me in Toronto, Ontario. Points for the correct province at least.
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