Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Consumer Law Blogs -> 43(B)log

Consumer Law

: 43(B)log

Today's propaganda coup

By Rebecca Tushnet

How best to illustrate the claim that copyright owners' use of the DMCA is poorly targeted? Get DMCA notices sent to printers by making their IP addresses visible using BitTorrent. Well played, U Wash programmers; well played. I have yet to read the full report, but I do wonder how often the problem of a user apparently requesting a file but not actually downloading it -- which seems to be why the printers got their notices -- causes false positives, and why we should care (that's at least an attempt to download, in the ordinary case) compared to the problem of dynamically assigned IP addresses. The report indicates that the dynamic assignment issue is, at least in theory, a source of false positives that has nothing to do with an attempted download by the person accused, and that strikes me as a potentially serious enforcement problem.

Full post as published by 43(B)log on June 06, 2008 (boomark / email).