Several recent government raids on computer users suspected of sharing child porn online hit the wrong targets. Instead of getting the perpetrators, some of the raids nabbed a neighbor with an open WiFi network instead. One obvious takeaway: letting total strangers use your Internet connection for any purpose comes with some risk. But there's another lesson: IP addresses simply don't identify the people behind the computers.
One federal judge in Illinois has already taken the lesson to heart and applied it to the P2P file-sharing case before him. John Steele, the main lawyer in Illinois who has brought such cases, recently came up before judge Harold Baker and tried his standard tactic: requesting expedited discovery so that he could turn his list of allegedly infringing IP addresses into names. (Steele has also attempted to lodge the case as a "reverse class action" in which unknown copyright infringers of a pornographic film are named as a "class" to avoid problems of jurisdiction.)
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