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Originally posted by darkangel
i believe that it could be argued that p2p and other Internet traffic could be considered "correspondence" which means the initial act of monitoring the connection would be illegal?
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But the connection isn't being monitored, as such. The the third party would just need to provide time stamps / IP address of the offending person, this can then be tracked via the originating ISPs logs to see who was allocated the IP at the time the incident took place.
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Originally posted by darkangel but how would they know if u where d/l or u/l copyrighted material in the first place?
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If copyrighted material is being offered via services such as Kazaa, copyright owners are likely to perform some of their own monitoring as to what is being offered by participants of the service. i.e. If I have 1000 files that I am sharing and they take a look at all the files I am sharing, it wouldn't take much to identify any of their copyrighted material - simply by downloading part or all of the file that I am offering they can confirm that I am in breach of their copyright. They simply then provide the ISP with my Kazaa identity, time and IP address of my machine and it can then be tracked back to me.
It'd be different if they were looking for persons performing the downloads, and harder to trace, so by targetting persons that are making the files available to everyone in the first place, they kill both birds with one stone!
Like I say, as long as the files are available for anyone to download from your PC / server, they must be available to the copyright owners, since you have no way of knowing who they are so that you can filter them out.
Anyway, the Internet functions on the basis of sharing files, such as this web page... it's only a file stored on a publicly accessible machine... it will always be possible to share files with others but the distribution methods will have to change.
Personally, I have no problems with actually purchasing MP3s online, at a reduced rate, provided that the right mechanisms are in place. This is something that the music industry has until now failed to provide for it's many customers... If they address that and concentrate on providing a good quality service at a reasonable price, then more people would be inclined to obtain their music from any legal sources.
