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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

How would they know who they were? Filing a lawsuit is a tool to find out.

What could they do though? I thought courts in the USA ruled that an IP address can't be used to identify a person. It seems like the most they could do is ban the account, which they can do for any reason they want.

They just said an IP can't solely be used to identify someone. You can use the IP address to get the name and then acquire additional information to prosecute the case. But you need to start with the IP address to get the ball rolling.

Interesting. So for instance if the offence is sharing a Hollywood movie on Bittorrent, the ip address would not be enough to get fined? What then? Use ip to get search warrant?

(I'm from Europe, asking out of curiosity.)

IANAL but it would go something like this: Twitch has IP addresses of the trolls, but no way to tell their real identity. So they file the lawsuit and then use it to subpoena the ISPs assigned those IP addresses to get their client information.

But there's no way they can prove that it was actually the owner that did this. An argument could be that someone got access to the WiFi, either maliciously or otherwise.

It's not enough to be used as evidence in court.

Most likely did the majority of the bots use proxies and VPNs, which may or may not provide additional information about their customers, but even then it has to be proven that is was the same user that did the acts which is very difficult.

It is enough to be used as evidence, it isn't enough, by itself, to definitively prove identity. It might be enough to get a subpoena to image the computers at the IP address. From there you might find the offending material that was broadcast, VPN accounts, chat logs talking about planning it, etc...

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