Strike 3 Gets Another Judge To Remind It That IP Addresses Aren't Infringers

While copyright trolling has continued to be a scourge across many countries, America included, there have finally been signs of the courts beginning to push back against them. One of the more nefarious trolls, Strike 3 Holdings, masquerades as a pornography company while it actually does the far dirtier work of bilking internet service account holders based on non-evidence. Armed typically with nothing more than IP addresses, the whole trolling enterprise relies on using those IP addresses to have ISPs unmask their own customers, under the theory that those customers are the most likely infringers of Strike 3 content. The courts have finally begun catching on to how faulty the very premise is, with more than one judge pushing back on IP addresses even being actual evidence.

It's a list that continues to grow, with one Judge in Florida apparently taking issue with the use of IP addresses entirely.

In February, Judge Ungaro was assigned a case filed by the adult entertainment company "Strike 3 Holdings," which has filed hundreds of lawsuits over the past several months.

The company accused IP-address "72.28.136.217" of sharing its content through BitTorrent without permission. The Judge, however, was reluctant to issue a subpoena. She asked the company how the use of geolocation and other technologies could reasonably pinpoint the identity and location of the alleged infringer.

Strike 3 went on to boast that its IP address matching was roughly 95% effective. After all, as Blackstone's Ratio goes: Better to let ten guilty men go free than to let any more than five out of one-hundred suffer.

That, of course, is not how the saying goes. Instead, the idea is supposed to be that justice is based on good, quality evidence that points directly to the accused. Instead, in addition to mentioned flawed IP location issue, Strike 3 flatout admits that this IP-to-user identification doesn't actually tell who infringed what.

Strike 3 further admitted that, at this point, it doesn't know whether the account holder is the actual copyright infringer. However, the company believes that this is the most plausible target and says it will try to find out more once the identity of the person in question is revealed.

That's actually remarkably honest as far as copyright trolls go: we're not entirely sure our IP address is correctly identified, and that IP address doesn't actually tell us who the infringer is, but we promise to try to get actual evidence if you help us with this non-evidence. Still, it doesn't make much of a case for the court ordering anything at all, does it?

That's why it really shouldn't be a surprise when you get a judge stating things like the following.

"There is nothing that links the IP address location to the identity of the person actually downloading and viewing Plaintiff's videos, and establishing whether that person lives in this district," Judge Ungaro writes.

The order points out that an IP-address alone can't identify someone. As such, it can't accurately pinpoint the person who allegedly downloaded the copyright infringing content.

"For example, it is entirely possible that the IP address belongs to a coffee shop or open Wi-Fi network, which the alleged infringer briefly used on a visit to Miami," Judge Ungaro notes. "Even if the IP address were located within a residence in this district, the geolocation software cannot identify who has access to that residence's computer and who actually used it to infringe Plaintiff's copyright," she adds.

Exactly. And the rules of evidence aren't there just for the sake of letting porn-watchers go free on technicalities. They matter. If we were to allow copyright trolls to substitute the kind of shoddy facts like IP addresses for actual evidence, and if courts were to accept that substitute, then what we're really all allowing for is a substitute for justice. The public doesn't want that.

And, it would appear, more and more judges are finally realizing that they don't want that either.