Legal Issues

Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick




Canadian Case Raises Issues About Who's Really Sharing Music

from the need-more-proof? dept

The Canadian battle over whether or not ISPs need to reveal the names of people who are being accused by the recording industry of sharing music is one of the first that actually raises the issue of proving who did the actual file sharing. While this has been brought up in discussions on the internet, it's the first time I've seen it actually raised during a file sharing related lawsuit. The recording industry can try to track down who pays for the connection - but that doesn't mean they know who actually did the sharing. In fact, the ISPs in Canada are specifically using the open WiFi example to point out that just about anyone could have been using a connection to share files, and it's wrong to accuse just the person who pays for the connection without any more proof that it was actually them.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    Feb 25th, 2004 @ 10:06pm
  • Woo!

    by Bish

    Wow! It's taken *this* long for the question of identifying the 'criminal' to come up? What have yo lot been *doing* down there? Don't you all have some constitution that protects you all from being wiretapped without cause and arrested without a clear identification?

    Or has some moron taken those away again?

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

    • Feb 26th, 2004 @ 9:43am
    • Re: Woo!

      by Saygin(?)

      Well... wiretap (and search) went away with the Patriot Act. (I'm exaggerating a bit, but not by much.)

      ID is pending in the courts right now.

      And copyright - as of the DMCA - never much concerned itself with constitutional protections anyway.

      (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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