Wikipedia said:
The new process, which will come into force when Ofcom's regulatory code is approved by Parliament, begins with rightsholders gathering lists of Internet Protocol addresses which they believe have infringed their copyrights. (This data could be gathered most easily by a rightsholder connecting to a Peer-to-Peer download of a work they own, and noting the other IP addresses to which their computer connects.) They would then send each IP number to the appropriate Internet Service Provider . . . The ISP must then send a notification to the subscriber in question. . . . The next stage in proceedings involves the rightsholder requesting a "copyright infringement list" from the ISP. This contains an anonymous list of all subscribers who have "reached the threshold set in the [Ofcom] code" with regard to infringement reports for their works. . . . The rightsholder can then approach a judge to gain a court order to identify some or all of the subscribers on the list, and with that information launch standard copyright infringement litigation against them.
In other words, it would go like this: Rightsholder downloads his own copyrighted work from a P2P site and records the IPs of other users serving the files or downloading them. Then the rightsholder gives the IP to the ISP, which identifies the owner by the IP and shakes a finger at them. Eventually the ISP sends back a list of anonymous users (just their IPs). The rightsholder then goes to a judge with the list and says "I want you to give me a court order forcing the ISP to reveal the identities of the people on this list so we can sue them!"
First of all, if a rightsholder downloads a torrent consisting of their own work, recording the IPs of those people who are connected to the same torrent is NOT going to give them sufficient information as to whether the user is even committing an act of piracy. Single files don't have seeds or leeches, torrents do; if I connect to a torrent consisting of Office 2007, a "clever" .NFO text file, and a keygen, according to this law Microsoft could record my IP and eventually ask a judge to order the ISP to reveal my name so they could sue me,
even if all I downloaded was the keygen (which is NOT against the law).
The big problem with this type of procedure is that the supposed plaintiff of a future lawsuit is the sole creator of the evidence based on which a judge will order a person's privacy to be assaulted. Furthermore, it forces the hand of the Internet Service Provider to relinquish personally identifiable information about their client
before the client has even been charged with anything or found guilty of anything, or before any evidence whatsoever has been submitted to a court of law against them - with the exception of a list of IPs which has been generated by the very entity which stands to gain something from litigation in the first place.
Find some other way than an IP address to connect your claim to a specific individual. Until they can do that, this is all hogwash. My IP is not my social security number. Joe Twelvepack next door shouldn't have to pay hundreds of thousands for songs he never downloaded just because he didn't know how to secure his wireless router.
head is up my ass today.
