Judge orders O2 to name suspected smut burglars A top judge in Blighty has ordered telco Telefonica to hand over the names of O2 broadband customers suspected of sharing porn online. In the High Court Mr Justice Arnold handed victory to copyright-chasing law firm Golden Eye International and the British smut-flick house Ben Dover Productions. Telefonica (the parent company …
No... but merely being 'alleged' filesharers would be, you'd hope. What's the betting one turns out to be blind & deaf, one a little old lady who's 'never been to Dover' and one a person who's been dead six years.
Shame a judge doesn't require a bit more evidence than (apparently) a (C) chaser's say-so.
ACS:Law were successful at this stage of proceedings as well. It is good enough evidence to get the Norwich Pharmacal order, but merely having an IP address and associated account number is not in itself good enough evidence to prove that the account holder was responsible for uploading the material.
I think some other term needs to be used rather than Intellectual Property. Given the number of IP suits that are being taken to court that seem to be anything but Intellectual. Software patents and the like should be Bleeding Obvious Property, grumble flicks could be Gratification Property, music could be Predictably Generic Property and Hollywood's output would be Total Lack of Inspiration Property.
When Telefonica release the details, they should also write to each alleged subscriber advising that:
A) their details have been released under a court order; and
B) in the event they are sent any legal communication, they should seek appropriate legal advice before replying.
It is about time the threatening extortion was stopped once and for all. Either take the pirates to court or stop demanding money with menaces.
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The letters to each subscriber as proposed by the claimant Golden Eye, seek settlement so as to avoid legal action.
If you have been injured by someone, you are not *allowed* to take them to court for damages unless you first, and at every further possible stage, seek settlement out of court. Anything less is indeed an abuse of the court system and looked on very unfavourably by the judiciary.
Admittedly this case is complicated by the fact that ending up in court could be unthinkably humiliating for each defendant - a fact acknowledged by the judge.
I remember that, he can't act for toffee. If only he tried to be a mainstream director instead - he could of easily been the man to bring us Avatar...
Ben Dover Films in association with SweetMeat and One Eyed Jacks Productions presents... Smurfette Dose Dorking - In glorious 3D!
In a world where people everywhere are blue and the movies are even bluer, one young woman defys all the odds and succeeds in her epic quest... to bang the entire population of a small Surrey commuter town!
Smurfette Dose Dorking - the movie event of the year, directed by the acclaimed master of meatslapping himself, Ben Dover! In cinemas now! Rated S for shit.
If you receive such a letter, you ask them to prove that it was you whodunnit. Being the subscriber to an IP address that was apparently used in infringing activity is not good enough evidence. There are ways to spoof IP addresses, for example to trick hulu.com into providing access to their videos outside the US, or to trick BBC iPlayer into providing access outside the UK. Someone near to you could have hacked into your wifi router and downloaded infrinding material, or someone could have installed a virus or trojan on your computer and routed traffic through it to conceal their own identity. Some p2p clients deliberately transmit lots of spoof packets to confuse the authorities.
They need to prove that you did it. You don't need to prove that you didn't. ACS:Law totally failed to prove that they did it. I can't see that this lot will manage any better.
I would ask them for the "chain of evidence" in collecting your IP address. Most likey it was some guy "collecting" IP with their computer (in a "business" ran from his house). I would say that's great, what keeps him from making it up, is he bonded, licensed, a government agency? No. How about where is the "other" 3rd party non connected "auditor"'s records that collaborate the first's.
Are you using WEP for wireless security, because that can be broken in 5 minutes. If so, where is the law that "mandates" that you have better than WEP for home wireless routers.
In the end, all "BD productions has is an "IP - xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and a time/date, recorded by "some guy" that says you did it. They can't "prove" anything from that.
I would love to see someone fight one of these guys and set a president for dismissal.
Fixed Line ISP's use RADIUS Servers to authenticate their customers and the logfiles from the servers can be searched to determine the IP Address issued to a particular username/password at a given time
Where the chain of evidence breaks down is if:
1) The time is not exactly correct
2) The IP Address is not exactly correct
3)The IP Address and/or username/password does not simultaneously exist in the logfiles with a different combination of details (concurrent search results)
4) somebody else has not clonedor used your UID/Password (easy if you have sold a router and not wiped the login details)
Of course If your ISP is using BT's Backhaul, the plaintiff would have to prove the information from your ISP was error free, and then re-prove it wth BT Systems, Then prove that the data handed over from BT backhaul to the ISP was 100% correct
Not Guilty - Reasonable Doubt
AC cos I don'twant to be on a watchlist
And when you've gone to the expense of finding all that, what do you hope to prove with an IP address and a filename they downloaded?
Because courts are reluctant to prosecute until you can RELIABLY identify an individual. An IP address corresponds to a phone line, at best. Sure, you could search and seize on the address, given the court's approval, but *PROVING* they had anything to do with it is going to be very tricky anyway.
Now multiply that up by wanting to search and seize lots of people, along with common knowledge that certain trackers insert fake / falsified addresses into their torrent swarms deliberately, and you're asking the judge to approve a mass search warrant over multiple potentially innocent properties. For a film worth a few pounds. Though, technically, there's nothing to say he couldn't do it, it's likely to be INCREDIBLY frowned upon because the intrusion will almost certainly never be justified by the outcome.
It's really like searching the house of every John in London because you once caught someone whose friend called him John stealing a DVD from your shop, but he got away. At some point, the CPS / judge just has to say no, or the future implications don't bear thinking about.
> Now multiply that up by wanting to search and seize lots of people, along with common
> knowledge that certain trackers insert fake / falsified addresses into their torrent swarms
> deliberately, and you're asking the judge to approve a mass search warrant over multiple
> potentially innocent properties.
So how many IR addresses are going to be handed over?
All?
All suspected?
What happens with the information after that?
I wouldn't want anyone with a porn reputation or any affiliates having anything remotely connected to me. So How do I know they never have any information on me?
Off on a tangent:
Apparently there is a 16 year old lad in detention under the USA's Patriot act, who has no redress to a court of law asking them to prove the evidence against him.
He has been held in secret for weeks with no lawyer.
How long before he breaks down?
And that sort of thing could happen here.
At least he didn't let any Daily-Mail-faux-prurience obscure the legal issue.
There was an instance a few years ago where a UK court refused to let a plaintiff pursue a case of blatant false advertising relating to adult services, and basically said "well if you're a perv it doesn't matter if you get ripped off ".
(The facts of the case : the plaintiff rang a premium rate phone line that was advertised with a picture of a busty young lady, and the text "HEAR ME MOAN !!!". The actual product consisted of five minutes of "When are you going to do the washing up and take out that rubbish ? You just sit round the house all day doing nothing ! I should have listened to my mother...")
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