District Judge: IP Address Not Enough To Prove Infringement

A Washington district judge has held that merely identifying an IP address does not provide enough evidence for copyright holders, seeking to stop file-sharing uploads of movies, songs, or other data, to make a case for infringement. In many cases, copyright holders looking to block file-sharing have providedan IP address as evidence and asked the courts to grant a subpoena that allows them to get information on the account holder. The problem, the judge said, is that in many cases an IP address alone doesn’t identify who is downloading, uploading, or in any way infringing the material, as it may be a family member, guest, or freeloader, and there’s no way to tell.