October 20th, 2006
The Irish Recorded Music Association’s members, the various record labels, have again announced that they intend to request that the court order ISPs to disclose their customer’s details to allow EMI et al to pursue them for damages relating to income lost due to filesharing.
As before DRI support copyright holders’ efforts to protect and assert their rights. However the way in which IRMA has done so still leaves a number of questions unanswered.
Most home networks are wireless these days, and most of those are unsecured. How can they tie the IP addresses they receive with any particular person?
Claims for lost income must be based on specific evidence of loss. Why have they never released their basis for calculating the claimed damages?
The company used by IRMA to collect data is in the US. Moving people’s data from Europe to the US has been found to breach EU data protection law. How can their evidence be used in court?
It appears that none of their claims have ever gone to a full hearing, allowing these issues to be debated in open court. Does IRMA fear the scrutiny of an open hearing?
If you are contacted by IRMA, we would be happy to talk to you. Contact us through any of these channels.
Entry Filed under: DRI, IRMA
8 Comments Add your own
1. Danny X | October 20th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
[code]Most home networks are wireless these days, and most of those are unsecured. How can they tie the IP addresses they receive with any particular person?[/code]
Someone steals you car because you have left the door wide open and the key in the ignition. Ignorance is no excuse. Your wireless network is your responsibility.
2. Fishy | October 21st, 2006 at 8:15 am
That’s a poor analogy. If someone steals my car because I left the door open, I’m not charged with theft.
3. Danny X | October 22nd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
The analogy might have been poor but the fact remains the same. Securing your wireless network is your responsibility.
4. Fishy | October 22nd, 2006 at 10:21 pm
Failure to secure a network does not make you liable in court for the claimed losses of a third party.
5. Danny X | October 23rd, 2006 at 1:33 am
Let imagine a wireless network is used to view child pornography. When the authorities visit the “it wasn’t me but someone on my wireless network” isn’t going to hold much ground. Securing an access point is the owners responsibility.
6. Fishy | October 25th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Examples of previous cases where record labels have failed to pursue when the inability to tie wireless network’s IP numbers to a person has been raised.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060727/1131227.shtml
7. SL | January 16th, 2007 at 12:29 am
“Let imagine a wireless network is used to view child pornography. When the authorities visit the “it wasn’t me but someone on my wireless network” isn’t going to hold much ground.”
Firstly, that’s a criminal rather than a civil matter. Secondly, it probably would hold ground since the burden of proof is on the prosecutor. Most convictions are made using credit card data and forensic examination of hard drives, not logs of TCP/IP traffic.
Thirdly, it’s a hell of a lot harder to secure a wireless router than you think. MAC filtering is an ineffective security measure, and WEP has been badly broken. The only way to secure a router at present is to use WPA with AES encryption, and a computer generated passkey. Almost anything else is vulnerable to a dictionary attack.
8. Digital Rights Ireland &r&hellip | February 1st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
[...] We’ve already pointed out that the procedure used to obtain user identities is unfair and the tactics which have been used by the record industry have been found to be illegal in other jurisdictions. Also, the approach taken by the music industry raises concerns about the proportionality of the damages they seek and the reliability of their evidence: * Most home networks are wireless these days, and most of those are unsecured. How can they tie the IP addresses they receive with any particular person? * Claims for lost income must be based on specific evidence of loss. Why have they never released their basis for calculating the claimed damages? [...]
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed