ISPA doubts file sharing evidence

ACS:Law has picked up from where the controversial Davenport Lyons law firm left off, in pursuing end ISP users for compensation due to allegedly unauthorised file sharing.

The latest edition of Which? magazine reports that they have a sample of 20 cases where they believe innocent people have received the letters chasing payment (and threatening court action otherwise) - as they had reported happened from Davenport Lyons' pursuing of consumers also.

ISPA, the Internet Service Providers' Association, has entered the fray around the standard of evidence - where the law firm passes on to the ISP (via a court order) the IP Address, date and time, file sharing network used and information on the content asset (from their client's monitoring of the file sharing networks) - and the ISP is then forced to turn over who was on that IP Address at that time.

ISPA said that they are:

"not confident in [ACS:Law's] ability to identify [ILLEGAL] users"

Of course, ISPA themselves didn't make the comment about being illegal - that emphasis has been added by ISP Review/Which who clearly aren't aware of this being unauthorised (a civil matter) rather than illegal (a criminal matter) activity.

The implications for the government's crack down on file sharing as part of the Digital Britain report are of more interest - if there is not consensus on the standard of evidence to track down those who are doing it, how is the problem going to reduce to the government's targets?