Every time a judge does something like this I have some hope that we will move past the current copyright legislation to something more appropriate for the digital age.
I'm sure that copyright has had its use, and in many ways still has uses today. But I'm also sure that the time of 'easy money' by the simple act of reproduction will come to an end, and as far as I'm concerned that can't happen fast enough.
Copyright, like any tool is a two edged sword, and the one edge has been systematically blunted whereas the other has been systematically sharpened. There was a balance where there is now a very strong imbalance and judges like this help to at least temporarily restore that balance, until we can move past the current implementation.
I hope it will happen somewhere in the next 50 years, sooner is better. The closer we are to a balance the bigger the chance that we can move on. So thanks to this judge.
I'm sure that copyright has had its use, and in many ways still has uses today.
My housemate, and his friend, have both told me copyright is a bastion in their industry- pharmaceuticals. It's not like they are Big Pharma shills either- he just graduated 2 months ago, and they both work for a tiny almost-company sheltered by a University.
In general it seems to be this way in every industry that doesn't yet move as fast as computing. Which has long suggested to me that what computing needs is not copyright abolishment or even sweeping reforms, but simply drastically shortened duration, perhaps in the range of 3-5 years.
Copyright? I think you must have misheard. Copyright has to do with creative works, not with physical substances. The pharmaceutical industry mainly relies on patents AFAIK.
Open wifi is't really a factor here, the word wifi is nowhere in the article.
The first major point is that the defendants did not act in concert (see article title).
The last point is this: "nothing in the BitTorrent architecture changes the fact that each defendant also will likely have a different defense."
That part of the ruling revolves around the fact that the defendants are all allowed to have their own defense and that rolling the 188 cases into one deprives them of a fundamental right: that to a defense they themselves are happy with rather than a single unified defense for all of them.
Of course that makes the case about 187 times harder to litigate than it was so far.
Actually, this ruling didn't have much to do with tech savvy, even though the judge does appear to be well-versed in the technology. It had more to do with the fact that actually managing a case like this would be a logistical nightmare. Trying to corral thousands of pro se defendants would be completely absurd and the judge lists just how many problems they'd have to deal with.
Granted, those problems probably wouldn't happen because these cases are dropped the second they get discovery and have a list of names and addresses of alleged infringers to go after. But they can't very well admit to the judge that the lawsuit was just a ploy to do discovery and run, so I'm interested to see if they'll do anything here. Most likely, they'll give up on those folks and hope for a different judge next time.
Many wifi passwords are trivially guessable, so the access points are already open. A more frightening question is, "how long until access points contain spyware to incriminate the owner in court?"
You don't need spyware; routers already keep logs. I'm not sure what discovery is like in civil cases in the US, but requisitioning the MAC addresses of all computers in the defendant's possession, as well as the router logs, would be sufficient to establish identity (or at least which computer was used). The fact that this doesn't seem to be widely used suggests to me that it exceeds the plaintif's rights to request said logs.
The vast majority of people don't know that. As civil cases have a much lower standard of proof than criminal, a mac address that matched the router logs for the downloads in question, and belonged to the owner of the connection, would likely be enough to establish identity. Given that a simple IP address is accepted by most courts as sufficient, MAC addresses would probably be icing on the cake.
I don't see how that would stand up in court, but I'm sure that ISPs will enforce this more strictly. I believe most ISP agreements with homes already prohibit operating a publicly-available hotspots, anyways; they just need to crack down.
I'm sure that copyright has had its use, and in many ways still has uses today. But I'm also sure that the time of 'easy money' by the simple act of reproduction will come to an end, and as far as I'm concerned that can't happen fast enough.
Copyright, like any tool is a two edged sword, and the one edge has been systematically blunted whereas the other has been systematically sharpened. There was a balance where there is now a very strong imbalance and judges like this help to at least temporarily restore that balance, until we can move past the current implementation.
I hope it will happen somewhere in the next 50 years, sooner is better. The closer we are to a balance the bigger the chance that we can move on. So thanks to this judge.