Copyright Infringer Slammed Tracking Firm in Court

When the creators of the B-movie Elf-Man launched a lawsuit against an alleged copyright infringer, the latter was smart enough to question the evidence collected by the tracking outfit. In particular, he expressed doubts whether the German-based firm had the right to operate as a private investigator.

As you know, massive piracy lawsuits are seen everywhere in the United States, dragging on for years and involving hundreds of thousands of defendants. Normally, such cases are initiated with an IP address being the main evidence, which is collected by a file-sharing monitoring outfit. The latter uses special software to connect to the BitTorrent swarm sharing infringing content. The problem is that it can’t identify a movie pirate – actually, some evidence gathering methods can’t even confirm whether the ISP account connected to the IP-address was actively sharing the file. This was brought to the attention of the court in the abovementioned lawsuit. The alleged pirate was trying to find out how the “investigators” collected their evidence – thus far, with little success.

For example, the defendant wonders how the tracking firm can be so sure that the IP-address was not spoofed, and how they know that he was the person who used it to share the file. The problem is that certain BitTorrent software allows for IP-address spoofing. Besides, the defendant doubts that the investigators (who are involved with many lawsuits in the US) even have a proper license for operating as private investigators.

By the way, this wouldn’t be the first time that the private investigator issue has caused trouble for a file-sharing tracking outfit. For instance, a few years ago the RIAA’s technology partner was also found to have acted illegally because it lacked the appropriate and required paperwork. The same can happen in the current case.