this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Discussing " "piracy" " (unauthorized copying) does not equate to being guilty of it: title aught to say "alleged".
The film industry in this case wasn't after the data to go after the individuals who made the posts but to use them as witnesses against their ISPs who did nothing in response to piracy complaints. The DMCA has a requirement for a repeat infringer policy and evidence that the ISPs knew about the piracy and that their users chose them or stayed with them because the ISP wouldn't kick them off goes a long way to winning the case against the ISP. They were going after the deep pockets.
Nearly every ISP assigns IP addresses dynamically. So unless they're using IPs from very close timespans, the raw IP addresses are effectively useless to identify repeat offenders.
Yes? But as the person you are responding to has mentioned, they're not after the individuals, they're after the "ISPs who did nothing in response to piracy complaints."
Having the IP address of those users will reveal which ISP they are using.
Just run a traceroute or tracert command against any website and you can see for yourself how your connection initially goes through your ISP before branching out to the rest of the internet.
The ISP would have the records to identify the repeat infringers. Or should at least. That was the problem the film industry is going after: the ISPs not doing even the bare minimum required by law to terminate infringers, even when they had been notified many times by rightsholders.
From a previous article about this case:
https://lemmy.world/post/10751737
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/film-studios-demand-ip-addresses-of-people-who-discussed-piracy-on-reddit/
Either the ISP has the records to identify the users and the film industry can get their information to use them as witnesses that way or the ISP doesn't have their information and shows how not-seriously they are taking the issue. Either way, it's bad for the ISP.
Also, do IP addresses really change that often anymore, even if you aren't paying for a static one?
For most ISPS, every time you restart your modem it will be assigned a new IP. Some ISPs may reassign the same IP within a small time period, but most will just assign a new IP for every new connection.
Must be a regional thing. I have the same IP for years, no matter which ISP I use. Struggling to think of a single time it changed in the last 20+ years.
My parents' isp setup a static dhcp entry per customer. If you change the mac address of your router you don't get an address. The address you get with the proper mac address is constant and can't be changed.