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Following a high-profile order at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this summer, copyright holders are facing a roadblock in their quest to demand settlements from alleged file-sharers. Referencing the August order, federal courts in districts across the US are demanding more evidence than an IP-address alone.
[...] In recent weeks, however, more and more judges have begun to ask questions.
This started after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached a verdict in Cobbler Nevada v. Gonzales. The Court ruled that identifying the registered subscriber of an IP-address by itself is not enough to argue that this person is also the infringer.
"Because multiple devices and individuals may be able to connect via an IP address, simply identifying the IP subscriber solves only part of the puzzle. A plaintiff must allege something more to create a reasonable inference that a subscriber is also an infringer," the verdict read.
[...] What's clear though is that the Appeals Court ruling is being used by courts across the country to demand "something more" than an IP-address alone.
While this is not the end of so-called "copyright trolling" practices just yet, it does make it harder for rightsholders to convince the courts.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/courts-want-something-more-than-an-ip-address-to-catch-pirates-181217/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21 2018, @12:51AM (5 children)
I dislike the perpetual copyrights and extortion-like behavior of big media players in the past (although it seems to have die down recently?). I also don't like the false-positives and suing 70-year old grandmas for supposedly pirating copies of Call of Duty.
However, this is also a bit unreasonable as well.
Let's say that you are the chief engineer of Big Media Inc. What information could you reasonably have access to about a person you know illegally downloaded a copy of your music? I'm having a hard time to think of anything you could find besides an IP address and ISP, and if you go to the police to get more info, you'll be laughed out of the room. So what can you do?
It seems like we walking to a defacto "pirating media is free." If that's what we as a society want then that's fine (and I'll admit that there is some attraction to that position). However, let's make that an active policy discussion rather than a cute catch-22 bind we pretend is fair to the copyright holders.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Friday December 21 2018, @02:31AM (2 children)
The difficulty of gathering evidence is not now and never has been relevant to the burden of proof. Simple proximity simply isn't enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21 2018, @03:31PM (1 child)
Yes, it has been. See probatio diabolica [wikipedia.org].
Probatio diabolica (Latin: "devil's proof", "diabolical proof") is a legal requirement to achieve an impossible proof. Where a legal system would appear to require an impossible proof, the remedies are reversing the burden of proof, or giving additional rights to the individual facing the probatio diabolica.
There is a good example on the page. Regardless, as noted, it is typical to give the accuser additional rights, such as allowing the legal discovery process to get more information. As courts are not allowing that, they are defacto allowing copyright infringer to "get away" with it.
As another poster said, an unenforcible law is a bad law, and this is in effect becoming unenforcible. As I said before, if we as a society want to make the policy decision that downloading things under copyright enforcement is legal, that's fine, but that should be a policy discussion. Not as a Kafkaesque Catch-22 situation against any party, including but not limited to big media.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday December 22 2018, @01:24AM
The problem exists, as the wikipedia page points out, however the "solutions" have no bearing on U.S. law.
Notably, for a while the courts were fairly lenient with the copyright holders (accusers) but after rampant abuse are no longer so kindly disposed.
Neverminding that, our law does not (and should not) allow disruptive and expensive for the defendant discovery based on little more than the say-so of a proven unreliable class of plaintiff over what generally amounts to a petty violation of copyright.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday December 21 2018, @09:33AM (1 child)
If a law is basically unenforceable, then it is a bad law.
To take something from a completely different area: Once upon a time, in many US states, sodomy was illegal. Just how the police were expected to enforce this? Perhaps by spying through people's bedroom windows? Whatever your beliefs about the morality of things, the sheer impossibility of enforcement made the law stupid.
Copyright enforcement is exactly the same: it is supposed to be illegal to hand out copies of a copyrighted work. I can easily copy music or movies from one USB-stick to another, and hand the copy to a friend. There is no way for the police to realistically enforce the law, to prevent this copying and distribution. Ergo, this law is stupid.
Downloading isn't really much different: war-driving exists, or people will choose stupid passwords, or share their password with friends and acquaintances. There is just no way to reliably tie an IP address to a person. Any law that relies (solely) on this, is a stupid law.
As long as I'm ranting: all those fees on blank media still, somehow, exist. Either that it prepayment that allows copying with no penalty, or those fees should not exist. Somehow, the copyright owners have managed to "have their cake and eat it, too". This needs to stop.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday December 21 2018, @11:02PM
You might also add that since so many people are ignoring this "law" then it should not be a law in the first place. The public obviously does not support it.
Exactly. Big media gets to collect ahead of time for copies they may or may not be made, plus they have the added scam of not being concerned about forwarding any of that income to the artists whose work has allegedly been copied.