Even though customer had canceled his Internet subscription 6 months before the alleged incident.
There’s a scary trend afoot in the UK and it’s every bit the slippery slope that many have suggested it will be. It centers around the UK’s voluntary partnership between copyright holders and ISPs, the latter agreeing to fight piracy on the former’s behalf with punishment for repeated violations as yet to be determined.
But, as many have questioned all along, why are private business concerns being given sole investigative powers for which there are very real repercussions? In a democratic society it is law enforcement’s job to enforce the laws of the land and not Business Inc.
The concern is well founded with recent troubling news of a UK man receiving a copyright infringement notice some 6 months after switching to a different ISP. Worse still, the notice comes courtesy of a copyright holder outside of the UK! I know we in the US would never stand for receiving such letters from foreign companies so why should the UK be any different?
Back in March of this year Euan MacLay discontinued his Internet subscription service with Freedom2Surf just before it was acquired by Tiscali due to previous poor customer service with that ISP.
Then to his surprise he received an e-mail from abuse@pipex.net 6 months later on August 23rd accusing him of having illegally downloaded an episode of “Stargate Atlantis” (S05E02) via the MightyNova BitTorrent tracker site.
The e-mail reads:
Dear Sir or Madam,
We have received a complaint regarding an allegation of Copyright Infringement. We were supplied an IP address of the system that was sharing the alleged copyrighted material, which we traced to your PIPEX ADSL account.
As I am sure you are aware, this breaches our Acceptable Use Policy, (http://www.pipex.net/legal/aup/) and many copyright laws, namely the Berne Convention. Please reply to this email within 7 days stating that your PIPEX account will not be used for copyright infringement or any breaches of the law or the PIPEX Acceptable Use Policy. Failure to respond or further infringements will cause your account to be temporarily suspended,and could also result in your account being terminated.
MacLay apparently though it was a “hoax or phishing attempt” at first, but ultimately discovered that the IP had indeed once belonged to him.
“I was absolutely shocked,” Euan told The Register. “How could they get something so basic so wrong?”
How? Easy. Copyright holders simply trace the IP for suspected file-sharers and then forward their findings in a copyright infringement notice to the associated ISP. Copyright holders make no attempt to determine a user’s identity. That’s left up to the ISP.
However, that’s precisely the problem. The burden of proof, which normally befalls upon a plaintiff to prove, instead befalls the defendant who must then disprove the charges. Instead of innocent until proven guilty, it’s guilty until proven innocent. Copyright holders are using IP addresses to prove identity when they are little more than transient bits of data markers. Unplug your router for a day and you magically get a new one.
In MacLay’s case he was fingered for having used BitTorrent to download copyrighted content illegally. But, a study by University of Washington researchers has already shown that the basis for identifying suspected pirates is flawed and prone to false accusations. They were able to implicate three laserjet printers for illegally downloading copies of “Iron Man” by using the network device’s IP address as a proxy server in the BitTorrent client.
Freedom2Surf eventually apologized to Mr. MacLay and blamed the problem on a now defunct “external” abuse system.
In any case, as the war on file-sharers heats up in the UK it’s only a matter of time before we see more and more people falsely accused of copyright infringement. With the burden of innocence falling upon the accused with obviously less resources than the plaintiffs it’s a recipe for injustice.
jared@zeropaid.com
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