Currently I am torrenting some Anime series that I CANNOT BUY. At least I can buy a crappy US import, regionalised and NTSC, but I cannot watch that because it is regionalised. Also, as well as being bloody stupid, regionalisation is theft. If I move to another country in the future i’m going to have to rip and re-encode all my legally bought DVDs and no doubt your crappy industry will tell me that’s piracy.

But for this thread, I DO NOT CARE HOW LAW ENFORCEMENT HANDLE IT…. They could send every single FBI, NSA, CIA, NCIS, DHS, ICE, CBP agent Texas Ranger, US Marshal, and police officer in the country to each and every house suspected of IP theft or they could just say “eh, we’ll get to it when there’s nothing else to do”…. I DON’T CARE….

What I’m arguing is a step before…. Back when the right-holders are standing before the judge saying “hey can you tell the ISPs to tell us who these IP addresses belong to?”

While I agree just because Mr. Smith’s name is on the AOL account doesn’t mean Mr. Smith is the one who shared the file. It could have been Mrs. Smith, or their kids, a neighbor, some random walking down the street etc…

My issue is why this fact should cause the judge to basically throw out the case. They have an IP address that they can link to copyright theft. They know someone using that account shared something they don’t have the legal right to share. Just because it doesn’t have to be Mr. Smith who shared the file doesn’t mean the case should just be dropped.

I don’t have any empirical numbers to back this up, but anecdotally, I would assume there is pretty good odds that the person who used the account to infringe would be someone in the house the account is associated with, since they likely have full access to the wifi network. Next likely, I would assume, would be neighbors within wifi range who would have enough time to crack the key and spend the time downloading the file. Hence, I said, knowing the actual address you’ve limited the primary possible infringers down to 9 households. While it could also be any random person on the street, it would take some time to crack the password & actually download the file… In doing so, the person would probably be noticed…

The reason I brought the bomb threat scenario up was in reference to you claiming there was no evidence. In my hypothetical scenario, all the police have to go on is a phone number in the call ID log. The same arguments could be made about the phone number. Just because they have a specific phone number doesn’t mean the person whose name is on the account is the one who called. Anyone in the house could have picked up a phone & it would show on the logs as the same number.And as long as they’re in range, a cordless handset could theoretically be synced to the base station… Maybe not as easily as cracking a wifi password, but it is possible…

Yet, if an officer showed up to a judge and said “We have a phone number, we need to find out who made the call” I doubt the judge would have any issue forcing Ma Bell to hand over Mr. Smith’s name…. Even though he’s just as unlikely to be the person who called as he is to be the person who downloaded the file… Yet, in order to gain more evidence and figure out who exactly made the call, I doubt a judge would ever say no to converting a phone number to account information (name/address/etc)…

So what makes a phone number more credit worthy than an IP address? Why do we say “Sorry you don’t have enough” for the IP address but without a second thought the judge would OK the phone number???

That is what I’m questioning…. Not, as you seem to focus on, the amount of involvement law enforcement places once they know who to investigate….

That’s kind of a short-sighted view, whether or not you believe it, especially if you consider that the push for laws which violate people’s right are done by groups and individuals who cater to the wealthy.

Not as long as wardriving is a juve sport.

See, since cracking a wifi wide open is child’s play, and a pirate usually tries to take SOME precautions, having evidence of an ip-adress downloading german goat porn is actually far more likely to be an indicator that the local punk has a beef with the grouchy guy living down the block.

That’s not enough to order a search-and-seizure which amounts to turning every piece of a person’s private life into an official investigation.

And yet nothing else than such a detailed search-and-seizure will provide actual proof of innocence or guilt.

There are TWO good reasons as to why search-and-seizure is not a proportional response.

1) See above. In essence it means the entire paradigm of presumed innocence is overturned in practice. For something not even as severe as jaywalking.

2) Do you know the actual cost to society of having a team of police officers raiding a household, confiscating the hardware, and having a forensic examination performed on it? Those officers, while trying to investigate a hundred million filesharers, are NOT investigating a few thousand murders instead. And the actual cost in tax payer money easily hits a thousand times or more of the expected “recovery” or “prevented harm”.

In short, a response such as you envision is not proportional and turns the act of copying a file into a “crime” suddenly being higher prioritized than murder and conspiracy to commit terrorism.
And yet no measure short of this will suffice, if any form of burden of proof is to be expected in a courtroom later on.

See the problem?

“Granted a bomb threat is slightly more severe than IP theft, but still…”

Ok…you are comparing risk of loss of life with filesharing…that in itself is not good.

Better comparison: Someone calls the police and screams “COME QUICK, SOMEONE is SPRAYPAINTING GRAFFITI ON A SHOP WINDOW”.

Would you consider it reasonable to send out a dozen FBI agents and three squads of cops to cordon off the area, no questions asked?

Imagine instead, someone calls in a bomb threat. The police/FBI come to investigate… They check the caller ID logs & see the call came in from 555-5555. Should the phone company be compelled to identify the account? After all, just because my name is associated with the account doesn’t mean I am the one who called the threat in. Anyone in the house who has a phone could have made the call & it’d show up with the same number. It could even be a neighbor or some random bloke passing by my house with a cordless phone they somehow synced to the base-station in my house…. I’d assume in this case, the judge would sign off & have law enforcement questioning everyone in the house by end of day.

Granted a bomb threat is slightly more severe than IP theft, but still… similar evidence links the culprit to my house… In once case you say “you call that evidence” in the other I doubt you’d have any issue with police detaining all of us until they figure out who made the call…

In the US that would be taking tipp-ex to the entire 4th amendment. You realize that would mean a search-and-seizure would be served on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, with more damning impact than if the subject had been suspected of large-scale drug trading or conspiracy to commit murder.

For “evidence” with less value than a crayon drawing made by a five-year old of the “suspect” making a copy of a media file?

I don’t think so, no.

So according to your own arguments, it’s quite OK if an innocent gets hurt. It’s no longer an argument you can credibly make.