Continuing in the current vein of discussion regarding the RIAA's tactic of sueing members of the public for downloading copyrighted content, I have a question that members of the forum may (or may not) find easy to answer. In the UK there's a 'loophole' in the law that can enable people to get out of speeding convictions if caught by a camera, by claiming that they do not know who was driving the vehicle at the time. If there is no evidence (ie the photo isn't clear) to show who was driving, they can in theory get away with it. So my question is: If I live in a shared house and have an internet connection which is shared with multiple residents via a network, and the RIAA launches a John Doe lawsuit against the IP address of the router; how do they decide liability? Obviously the ISP will return the account holder's details once they are compelled to by a court, but what if the account holder didn't do the downloading? You could take this hypothetical a little further by introducing the concept of the unsecured wireless network - not exactly unlikely these days. Some innocent middle aged householder gets stung for their next door neighbours reluctance to buy the latest series of 24 on DVD... Any comments / opinions? Regards to all, Jamie
See the following: http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-vs-ip127001/ http://superskeemer.blogspot.com/ http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/08/01/RIAA_forced_to_drop_download_case/ http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13747 We can't give you legal advice easily, I'm afraid, and neither would a lawyer easily give you an answer to such a grey subject. Hope this helps though.
Thanks Xitanto. As pointed out elsewhere on the forum, this article on the register has mentioned that a case has recently been dropped due to this argument (as well as mentioning Shawn's). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/03/industry_drops_filesharing_case/ - Jamie
its simple, somebody gets caught on p2p hey are fined anything from £500 to £50,000 my latest clients files were exposed on the web and that was copyright infingement so he took over 300 people to court because they had his files, when you get a client that will be getting around £10K per sued person he is very good to keep close and een assist him in finding peopl to ue, we make a healthy sum from him. in total the ammount is something i could live on for a few years.