RIAA IP address claim ‘erroneous’
p2pnet news | RIAA news:- Every time Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA comes up with what looks like an effective technique for ferreting out victims for its sue ‘em all anti-P2P, anti-file sharing attacks, it moves it to the Standard Operating Procedure category.
An excellent example is its the now established SOP of suing parents before turning to the real victims: their children.
The same can be said of the way in which the RIAA is trying to coerce universities into handing over the identities of students, as the University of New Mexico can testify.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was defeated, ignominiously, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
But court decisions mean absolutely nothing to the Big 4 or their RIAA, and now it’s trying it with the Oklahoma State University.
OSU students aren’t, however, about to cave in some them are asking a judge to in effect deny the RIAA’s demands.
They’ve made a motion to, “vacate the ex-parte order the RIAA had obtained compelling the university to turn over their names and addresses,” says Recording Industry vs The People.
Jason Street, an expert witness who’s supporting the motion, says the declaration of the RIAA’s Carlos Linares was “factually erroneous” and “misleading”.
How so? The RIAA is using its hoary, thoroughly discredited, “IP addresses can identify alleged transgressors’ approach.
Street says in a court document:
Plaintiffs’ witness Linares’declaration … states:
Users of P2P networks can be identified by their IP addresses, because each computer or network device (such as a router) that connects to a P2P network must have a unique IP address within the Internet to deliver files from one computer or network device to another.”
But, “in my opinion, the above statement is factually erroneous,” says Street unequivocally, going on:
An individual cannot be uniquely identified by an IP address. An IP address must be unique on a given network. However, networks of networks can have many duplicate addresses. A common technology called Network Address Translation (NAT) is used to present a single IP address from one network as the only address for all computers behind the control point (such as a router).
And:
Any log capturing source IP addresses in a communication stream will only record the control point IP address. The actual IP address or any other device-specific identifiers are stripped away by the control point in the data stream and cannot be recorded by a mid-stream or end-point locking mechanism.
Further down, Street points out Linares tries to compare an IP address with a telephone system. But, says the Oklahoma students’ expert witness:
The Internet (which the Plaintiff’s claim is the delivery mechanism in this case) is not a circuit-switch network. Instead, it is a packet switched network. In such a network individual packets are created by the end-point devices and deposited onto the network with destination information. Control devices within the network can then decide which path the individual packets will take across the network. Not all packets of a given communication stream will necessarily take the same path. As such in a given network, there can be many simultaneous communication streams that are presented through a single control point and all logged as coming from a single IP address.
At the end of his testimony, Street states the RIAA’s claim an IP address can uniquely identifies someone, ” is an oversimplification and illustrates the Plaintiffs’ attempts to use technical terms to assign plane without evidence sufficient to identify the alleged file sharer.”
Acting for the students is Marilyn Barringer-Thomson who successfully defended Oklahoma mother Debbie Foster in another RIAA attack.
Click on the microphone on the right to hear this story. 
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Also See:
defeated, ignominiously – RIAA ID demand thrown out, June 20, 2007
Recording Industry vs The People – Oklahoma State University Students Move to Vacate Ex Parte Order; Security Expert Says RIAA Declaration is Wrong, August 7, 2007
successfully defended – RIAA must pay Debbie Foster $70,000, July 17, 2007
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