How Do ISPs Find The People “Illegally” Downloading Music?
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) looks to see who is making copyrighted works available for download by connecting to P2P networks. It is very easy to get the offender’s IP address and find out which ISP the IP address belongs to. The associates will contact the ISP with a complaint. The ISP can look at their records and essentially match the IP address to account holder. Even with dynamic IP addresses (where the IP address changes) the ISP can have records showing that party xxxx had xxxx IP address on xxxx date & time. I don’t know how long the ISP’s retain this information. From the original RIAA press release (June 25, 2003) announcing their data gathering effort to identify P2P infringers: …..Starting tomorrow, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will begin gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual computer users who are illegally of
In my experience, ISPs don’t care about illegal music, and they don’t have to “find” you, they already know who you are. Rather, it’s the music industry that cares about the music you upload and download. If the music industry lawyers decide to hunt you down, they start at the sharing sites and track you back to your ISP. The ISP can then decide whether they want to hand over information as to what person those IP addresses translate to. Some ISPs have refused to cooperate in the past, but it seems like lately they’re a lot more likely to hand you over. However, ISPs might care about the amount of bandwidth you’re sucking up. I’ve known more than a few people who had their accounts cancelled or restricted because these people were using too much bandwidth. Most of these people were trying to run game servers or other similar services, but if you’re going hog wild with music sharing, it’s possible that the ISP might start caring about the bandwidth that you’re taking up. It depends on t
