who they accuse of illegally sharing copies of the film

Good. People who share copyrighted content deserve to be punished.

and site owners who have no idea their ip addresses have been proxied or sites hacked don't. I'm curious as to how the courts will verify the IP addresses against the real criminals, a definitive process needs to be used and that could be applied to other forms of copyright theft too. We're not there yet. Revealing ip addresses does little good if you can't prove ownership and intent, hopefully they can.

Sentence first, trial afterwards: business as usual for the IP robber barons.

>Revealing ip addresses does little good if you can't prove ownership and intent, hopefully they can.

In order to obtain the IP addresses, they will argue that it's not personal information.

Having obtained the IP addresses, they will immediately argue that an IP address uniquely and infallibly identifies a specific person (who is the ISP's customer.)

This way, it's unnecessary to get involved in all that innocent-until-proven-guilty or rights-of-the-accused stuff, which involves much too effort.

Having obtained the IP addresses, they will immediately argue that an IP address uniquely and infallibly identifies a specific person (who is the ISP's customer.)

If their case depends on this, they are in trouble. I do wish we could enforce copyright in a reasonable way. This, alas, is not reasonable.

But, keep in mind that if no one made any kind of money on the copy or benefited in anyway, it's difficult to sue for copyright infringement.

Anyone at any IP with an open wifi can claim innocence too but that won't stop them from paying with precedence just set in Germany!

The Karlsruhe court ruled that Wi-Fi owners are liable for abuse by a third party in cases where they fail to password-protect their internet connections.

[theregister.co.uk...]

>But, keep in mind that if no one made any kind of money on the copy or benefited in anyway, it's difficult to sue for copyright infringement.

Unfortunately, in the U.S. this isn't true. And there's a lot of really big money chasing after politicians to make sure it isn't true in other places also.

To be fair, there are also other issues. Printing presses can be used to print child #*$!, make fun of Mohammed, or report local events to the world: and so, in most of the world, they are inherently criminal tools.

Did I say Printing presses? I meant PTPTP networks: "Peer-to-peer-transmission of paper".

And digital publishing has some of the same issues.