I am puzzled by the ability of the RIAA to even find out who is using the various file sharing networks such as Kazaa. I thought the whole point of peer-to-peer was to keep all information off of a central server or servers. How does the RIAA even find out who is downloading what? (Plus, I heard that with some of gnutella-based networks, it's all encrypted.) To issue all these subpoenas, they must have probably cause - where do they get that from?
Some fool sharing thousands of MP3 was considered clear probable cause by the court issuing the subpeonas. Posting the MP3s is considered sufficient expectation that a breach of the copyrights is in progress. Surfing the internet isn't anonymous. You leave tracks. They identify you IP at a certain time, trace the IP to your ISP, and then can get the ISP to cough up their record of which user ID was assigned that IP at that time. Then they fork over your personal info based on the user ID and they've got you. Even encrypted file sharing systems leave some tracks, especially if they're peer to peer rather than through an intermediate traffic relay server.
But that's my question: how do they even know it's an mp3 that's flying around some internet trunk? Where are they sniffing? It can't be on an internet pipeline - only our beloved govt can do that. And surely ISP's aren't letting them sniff unless the RIAA is paying them off...
They don't need to sniff around the internet backbone to do that. All they need to do is download kazaa, look for songs and find users who share large numbers of songs. Bingo! TM Trader
Gotcha. But I thought in p-2-p you could not really tell the source since one IP was mapped to another IP which was mapped to another IP kind of like a spider web and sometime serially. How do they know the IP on their internet connection is really the "offending" IP?