To Slow Piracy, Internet Providers Ready Penalties (nytimes.com) | Hacker News Reader

To Slow Piracy, Internet Providers Ready Penalties (nytimes.com)

nytimes.com

17 pointskingkawn5 comments

A month ago I got a letter from Comcast Security alleging a DMCA infringement claim against me for downloading some kind of MLB game torrent by a rights holder. It sounded like Comcast had turned over my information to that company based on a log of several bytes of a torrent seeded by what was supposedly my IP address.

Among the many issues with the complaint:

* I was the only internet user any time near the date of the alleged infringement, and I don't torrent things.

* I had never heard of the MLB game I allegedly pirated, based on their supposedly downloading several whole bytes of a torrent from my IP.

* The IP address was not mine. The IP assigned to my modem hadn't changed in years, the one in the complaint was never mine, and was owned by a different ISP in a different region. Through a series of faxes (the only way to contact anyone, Comcast Security's phone lines only play prerecorded messages about copyright law) I was able to reach someone that verified the IP in the letter was not and never was assigned to my modem.

So now next time some copyright troll sends out a thousand notices to Comcast and they decide to link some other person's IP address to an innocent customer's account, not only will they get a nasty letter, but their connection will be degraded? Great...

I canceled my Comcast account after that letter and signed up for FiOS.

A while back, researchers were able to implicate laser printers under their control and get people to issue DMCA complaints based on nothing more than feeding the IP of the printer to a tracker. The printers, obviously, never downloaded a thing.

If the penalty involves getting someone banned from the internet, I doubt it will be long before there are problems with people falsely implicating people they hate.

Further discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738776

It would be nice if ISP would spend some time tracking spam bots on their network and shut them down too.

They certainly do. Nobody wants to get into RDNSBL.

Although, I believe, most of time ISPs just block outgoing tcp/25 connections for spambot victims.

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