Judge: U.S Copyright Group can subpoena ISPs for identities of 23k file sharers

If there are any smart lawyers representing those people, they will ask the subpoenaed ISPs how many requests for identification the ISP was not able to match to a subscriber. That right there will give you some idea of the data quality. I mean, suppose the ISP was only able to identify the subscriber for 15 out of 20 IPs. In this hypothetical example, you would have it on record that this identification method was wrong at least 25% of the time.

That puts you in a much stronger position to argue with their experts who say that their proprietary technology (that they refuse to show anyone) is wonderful and perfect and that you're just speculating about what might or might not have gone wrong. That said, it's a double-edged sword: if their tech is good, things could go the other way. I've heard stories where there were tons of misidentifications and others where there were few, so I don't know any good way to tell.

I'm surprised none of the ISPs are complaining. They generally can't handle tens of thousands of requests. And this sort of thing will eventually have to go to a higher court. Different courts have split over whether copyright holders can do this sort of thing.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/05/expend...

What's scary is, I fully expect those to actually be in the list given the group doing the work on this...