Re: IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State -Judge Rules
Slowly, judges are starting to get it. All this stuff with IP addresses being some one has been hokem from the word go. But with the courts not being familiar with the internet and how it works, the only input to court has been the ones claiming to be wronged. The whole thing has a stink about it when looked at from the reality that a mp3 file can be had for no more than $2 but has a statutory penalty of $150,000 per incident. As the judge in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial noted, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment for the civil offense.
When you go look at the reason that statutory damages are used as opposed to the other method of calculating the damage done prior to court, the $2 value doesn't pay for the lawyer time, even if Jammie had shared a single file 2000 times. The copywrong gang doesn't use one lawyer, it uses a battery of high priced lawyers. To calculate damages, they would have to know that Jammie actually had shared, how many times she had shared each song, and when. These are all immensely hard to do with the internet. Instead statutory damages are used where a fixed penalty for a fixed occurrence has happened. It's a slimy way to do it and jack up the punitive damages.
But the whole thing comes down to 'who did it'. For that the copywrong gang has always maintained that who ever owned the account was the guilty party. When you get into ISPs like AOL or Bulldog, they don't assign you a dedicated IP. They do what is called proxy IPs from a batch of numbers that are assigned to you for a session, making them dynamic IPs that always change. They are not assigned like the major telcos to a location. This is why IP numbers aren't people, don't identify someone behind the keyboard, nor are they even good locators to determine the court of jurisdiction.
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