Left to chance

Here’s a good Slashdot story: “A judge in Rochester, New York, has denied an RIAA application for default judgment on the ground that the RIAA’s evidence was insufficient, in that it contained no details of actual downloads or distributions, and no sufficient evidence that defendant was in fact Kazaa user ‘heavyjeffmc@KaZaA.’ The decision concluded that ‘there are significant issues of fact regarding the identification of the defendant from his alleged “online media distribution system” username.’ (In case you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘online media distribution system,’ that’s because it is a term the RIAA coined 4 years ago to describe p2p file sharing accounts in its lawsuits; the term is not known to have been used by anyone else anywhere else.)” So while an IP isn’t good enough to nail down a ‘downloader’ (or in this case someone who used Kazaa, for what we don’t know), here a judge decides that a user name (which anyone can make up) doesn’t truly represent a certain person.