If they did that the industry would lobby congress to require ISP’s to maintain logs.

It’s not clear what kind of compensation you would get for it, should you press the matter. In the best case, where you prevail against the RIAA, the actual damages would be the cost of defending yourself.

Some people, who knew nothing about filesharing have had unpleasant surprises in the form of a subpoena and lawsuit due to erroneous recordkeeping or misinterpretation of whatever records were kept. These would include several people who exclusively used Macs, but were accused of infringement using a p2p client that only runs under Windows on a PC.

The ISPs could do themselves and everyone else a favor by simply switching to ‘ephemeral’ logs. The recording industry most certainly knows the meaning of that word as it figures prominently in the rights and royalties sections of contracts. If at time X, the status of their network was nominal operations, there is virtually no reason (from a technical point of view) that at time X + 36 hours, a technician would need to examine logs that mapped specific IPs to specific users. If someone hosed the backhaul on their node, or crumped an upstream router, or ran their upstream full bore for several continuous hours, they would know this already and would be able to identify and deal with that party.

After that, they can just aggregate data, discarding the specific logs mapping an IP to a user (for DHCP and PPPoE. Those with static IPs might be out of luck here.)

Then, when confronted with a subpoena they can respond that the data sought is ephemeral and permanently erased after 36 hours. As long as this is a written, stated policy and consistently followed, the party issuing the subpoena has no recourse. What no longer exists (or never existed in the first place) can not be remanded to a third party.

There is no legal requirement for an ISP to keep any user logs at all. In the USA, virtually all broadband internet connectivity service is priced soley by connection speed and type (static or dynamic IP) and not by connect time or actual throughput (quantity of data sent and received,) so user IP information is totally irrelevant for billing (or tax) purposes.

The ISPs would be doing us a big favor (and saving themselves cost and expense) if they’d simply stop collecting this information and archiving it forever like sports statistics.

–TG

I would laugh my ass off if that happened and it got posted as a massive bust only to find their own computers.

Of course by the time you have been informed they’ve already got all the details.

Cheers!