Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say::Reddit says First Amendment rights protect it from having to disclose users’ info.
Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say::Reddit says First Amendment rights protect it from having to disclose users’ info.
If you read the article it states at the film studio wants the IP address is to prove that Frontier is not doing anything about people pirating on their ISP. They claim that they aren’t going after the individuals themselves. The headline is deceptively vague.
But they are indirectly going after these individuals. They just want Frontier to handle the punishments rather than doing it themselves.
And reddit still shouldn’t release the IP address of specific users without a warrant.
Oh sure, trust that they won’t abuse that data. That’s unheard of. It’s not like there’s a ton of ways to abuse that info, I swear!
Well you probably couldn’t go after someone individually with that kind of information, realistically. Most consumer grade connections have dynamic IPs. So the IP of user posting to reddit isn’t actually uniquely identifying. Your ISP could match which customer had which IP at a specific point in time, but if point in time you’re tying the IP to is when a given user posted a discussion about pirating, that doesn’t actually correlate to actual pirate activity happening at that time.