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Rob Beard wrote:
Then the ISP gets a kicking for screwing up the identification. I've done loads of them when I was working the AUP team. The complaint must include an accurate time-stamp and IP address for the alleged infringement. It's not rocket science for the ISP to query the server logs for an IP address and time-stamp. If they stuff up the time-zone and/or their system time is wrong - e.g BST instead of GMT- which has been known, it's not the customer's fault.Julian Hall wrote:That's not to say mistakes don't happen, especially if you're on a dynamic IP, what's to say that you don't pick up an IP address which was used by someone who was infringing, it's happened in the past, or at least little old ladies have been accused of downloading gay porn.dandart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:Then you won't get challenged because AFAIK the challenges are based on alleged sharing of specific items such as a game/movie/music track. Legitimate items - such as Linux distros - won't be on the watched list so you won't attract attention sharing them :)What if you DO fileshare, but don't disobey copyright law?Julianhttp://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-start-protecting-gay-gestapo-porn-081118/Rob
That's probably why Which's first advice is to contact your ISP for confirmation of the identification. A second pair of eyes might say 'hang on this was 12:05 AM not PM' for example - although in that specific case it's 24 hour clock so that kind of idiocy shouldn't happen.
Having said *that*, a salutary tale. I'm on a cablemodem connection and some time ago I had a letter from ntl (as it was) claiming I had been identified as the source of spam being sent out. As I knew conclusively they were wrong I rang them to query this, ending up chatting to a Senior Tech. He checked into the accounts and found *three* IP addresses logged against the MAC address for my cablemodem. Someone had spoofed my MAC address[1] - something I suspect is harder than spoofing an IP address. Given this incident I'm curious how the complainant (or the ISP for that matter) could conclusively prove that the customer - the accused - was the only person capable of using that IP address.
Anyway, what about anonymising software? There's plenty of that about and the operators tend to be resistant to assisting law enforcement agencies with their inquiries.
As I said originally though, AFAIK the companies monitoring P2P networks have a list of names, e.g. Avatar that they are looking for. I seriously doubt someone sharing a file called 'Ubuntu' would get pursued because that won't be on the music/game/film industries' hit list.
Julian[1] In the end ntl supplied me with a new modem, despite the fact I had bought the old one - they paid me the cost price.
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