Campaigners: Government must learn from ACS Law case

DEA Act

The DEA act is too broad, the phrase "You are innocent until proven guilty" gone, The DEA will target entire households and organisations, and leave them stigmatised, for one alleged file sharer.

This to me is like the drunk driver who is carrying passengers; charge all of them with the same offence.

Using an IP address is not sufficiently robust enough; any accused household/organisation of file sharing will need to go to court to challenge the accuser to clear their name and others within the household.

I think the DEA is now dead in the water due to ACS|Law dropping court action, as using the IP address was not sufficiently robust.
If copyright holder’s assertions that file sharing is a huge problem, then this will cost the country huge amounts of money in court time.

By Chrisfjr1300 on 24 Mar 2011

DEA may not be the bogeyman

Until legislation is passed, and there has been a High Court - or an appealed County Court - judgement, I wouldn't worry too much about DEA.

Consider the Tenancy Deposit Protection scheme: the verdicts in Tiensa, and later Soens-Hughes v. Lewis, have blown the legislation open. Whilst I - and you - would probably feel that the judges were not upholding the spirit of the legislation (and thus removing the consumer protection it strove to afford), the judges were acting on the poor wording. Whilst headline judicial farces skew popular opinion one way, we can rely on the majority of the judiciary to protect us from "bad law". If the DEA allows a single-IP as the evidential burden of proof, a competent barrister and a half-decent judge (or appeal judge) will be able to cast sufficient doubt. Even if it is a "strict" offence, as TDP 'is', it is possible.

Lets wait and see. Oh, and continue to lobby our MPs anyway :-)

By alan_lj on 24 Mar 2011

"Illegal" lawyers

What is justice? We hear of too many cases where certain lawyers deliberately use the law against justice. Take the case of a certain MP's husband and Berlusconi. Is it time that every lawyer was required to swear an oath to uphold justice regardless of whether they act for defence or prosecution and very particularly in divorce cases. Lawyers use their knowledge at their discretion and sometimes that discretion is not seeking justice or the rights of individuals. Surely it is time to reign in those who cannot use their discretion wisely.

By Jaguar on 24 Mar 2011

Accused or Guilty?

" ... The Government's Digital Economy Act will see even more letters sent to people who have been caught illegally downloading"

Aksherley, no!
Letters will be sent to those whom the rights owners ALLEGE to be guilty.

In other words such letters are allegations of guilt, not the delivery of a court verdict declaring the outcome of a trial that demonstrates the case beyond any reasonable level of doubt.

Writing that sentence in such a form presumes guilt a priori and perpetuates the public's confusion about the [many] issues surrounding the DEA.

Innocent until proven guilty has long been, is now, and should remain a standard of justice.

A correction to the article would be nice.

By imagineer1 on 24 Mar 2011

ip address?

I do not have an IP address as such. BT give me a new one every time I log on. These IPs come from their pool of shared addresses which, I guess, thousands of people have already used. The only way such addresses could be used as proof of anything would require an association of my computer with whatever illicit activity at a certain time. The IP address would be irrelevant in this case.

I can not believe all file sharers are using private IP addresses.

Could someone correct my reasoning if I have missed the plot?

Fred

By fred1066 on 24 Mar 2011

IP Address

Hi Fred1066, most users will connect to the internet via a broadband router, the router will convert your public IP to a private IP, therefore a public IP the IP will look like this 212.58.244.69 (this happens to be the BBC website)

Your private IP will look like this 192.168.0.1, or 192.168.1.1, the conversion process is called NAT ( Wiki has a good explanation)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_trans
lation

In my case my public IP has not changed in over 6 months, due to the fact I have a broadband router and this is left switched on permanently, Some users connect to the internet via a USB MODEM, and yes you are correct in that statement, that you don't have a fixed IP, as when you turn your PC off, the IP address that you have"leased" will have gone back in to the pot to be reallocated.

By Chrisfjr1300 on 25 Mar 2011

IP address

Thanks for the info Chris.

I have a BT router and always turn it off at night to avoid un-necessary exposure to the wild web.

I just checked my IP, it was 86.132.222.206. I logged off and then logged on which came back with a new IP, 86.137.133.55. Obviously my local IP remained unchanged at 192.etc.

It seems to me that it is only pot luck that DEA catches someone like you who have effectively given yourself a permanant IP whereas how would they ever catch someone who uses at least one and probably several different IP addresses in one day? A 192.etc number would be of no legal use since many private networks will use this same number sequence behind their own firewall and NAT.

If the DAE came to me and said I had been stealing files (which I do not do) I can not see how they could prove that I had been using the IP address concerned for a file theft. They would have to ask the service provider who was using a certain IP at a certain time and date. Do service providers keep this level of information for shared IPs?

I can see that a service provider or anyone else can soon find out who owns fixed IPs but shared ones?



Laurence

By fred1066 on 25 Mar 2011