After several video game publishers publicly showed how they planned to combat software piracy, the lawsuits began to fly against suspected pirates.
But the problem with blindly targeting people based on an IP address means the copyright holders will occasionally accuse innocent Internet users of infringement.
Atari accused Gill and Ken Murdoch of pirating Race07, but the couple reportedly have never played a PC game. Although the case was eventually dropped, Which? Computing believes there could be hundreds of British Internet users who are in a similar situation.
The Murdochs received a letter that said they could either pay £500 ($829) or could be taken to court over the matter. According to Gill Murdoch, 54, both her and Ken, 66, have never played a PC game and didn’t know what peer-to-peer meant until they received the letter.
Atari relied on the anti-piracy firm Logistep to help combat piracy, with Logistep responsible for discovering the IP addresses of suspected software pirates. Once the company has an IP address, it can then turn it over to Atari’s lawyers, who will apply for the necessary court order.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) also has accused innocent people of piracy, much to the delight of piracy supporters. Most notably, the RIAA reportedly charged a dead man for sharing copyrighted pop music through a peer-to-peer network.
Many popular file sharing services, such as The Pirate Bay, are now using a tactic that involves random IP addresses being inserted into files to help confuse people tracking file sharing. It’s plausible that the Murdochs were snagged after their IP address was wrongly used by one of these file sharing services.
5 Comments
Imagine if some jerk (maybe someone you know) downloads child porn with your connection or spoofs your IP and used your real name as their username to hide? Do you really think you can talk yourself out of that? Well, where's the porn you say? The cops will just want to know where you laptop is and when you try to explain that you don’t have one they'll just charge you for tampering with evidence too! Everybody that knows you will never know for sure and always suspect you for the rest of your life. That's if you're lucky enough not to accidentally get shot when swat busts in or accidentally get raped to death while you're waiting for trial by the other inmates who look down on crimes like abuse of a child.
No, an IP number is not you. It's not your identity and it sometimes can't even say what computer made the connection let alone who was sitting at the computer when the act took place. We need a law that says an IP does not count as evidence AT ALL FOR ANYTHING! They do not work like they do on TV! Unfortunately few people understand this.
A likely story. Look, all I know is that when the ETF comes knocking at your door, it's "deny, deny, and deny some more". If I was told I had 24 hours to live, the first thing I would want to do is delete *stuff* from my hard drive. Then I would format the drive. Then I would microwave the drive for 30 seconds. Yeah, that should about do it.
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