Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 31st, 22

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December 31st, 2022




What is P2P?
Nate Drake

What is P2P and what can it do for you?

In the context of networking, peer-to-peer (P2P) is a way in which devices can communicate with each other on equal terms.

It helps to understand this by comparing P2P to traditional downloads. When you visit a website on your computer to download train timetables, for example, your device (the client), is requesting information from the train operator’s computers (the server). This is known as the “client-server” model. The information is requested by the client, then sent by the server.

P2P works differently. Every device or ‘node’ can both send and receive data. Effectively, this means that each node is both a server and a client. This is usually done with special software and has many uses : for instance IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an example of P2P in that anyone using the right software can send and receive messages from anyone else who’s connected to the network.

In a P2P network, devices connect to each other to share resources. This is very useful for operations like downloading files, as users can download fragments of the file from every other connected device in the network that already has the file rather than wait for it to be sent by a central server. And it’s usually much faster.

Some of the first early popular P2P file-sharing programs were Napster and GNUtella. Users could download the client from a website then connect to other “peers” to download files to their machine: unfortunately this gave the P2P protocol a bad name, as users often used the clients to upload and download copyrighted content like music.

Why use P2P?

Given its association with illegal file-sharing, you may wonder why anyone would make use of P2P.

The main reason is that it’s far less costly and more reliable to share data via a P2P network than for everyone to download the same information from a central server, which must be online at all times and able to handle the connections.

Setting up a server to share information also requires considerable expertise and money, though for small scale projects you may be able to use a VPS provider.

In order to start sharing data via P2P, generally all you need to do is install the relevant software program on your device.

The fact that P2P doesn’t have to rely on a central server means there’s no single point of failure, so generally if one device fails, the network won’t shut down. One exception to this was Napster, which used a single server to manage connections between nodes. This meant that when Napster shut down its server in 2001 in compliance with a court order, the whole network went offline.

P2P pitfalls

In the nature of things P2P networks involve every device being connected to every other. This can cause security concerns as other devices can see your IP address. As there’s no centralized network operating system or tech support team monitoring and organizing data it’s down to you to find what you need and check it for malware before downloading to your device. This also applies to P2P programs, as bad actors will sometimes conceal malware and adware inside them.

As each node in a P2P network is usually a computer owned by an individual, people connect and disconnect all the time, meaning it's difficult to keep the network stable. As more nodes connect, it also takes more resources to search for the information you need.

Some P2P protocols like Gnutella use various methods to get round this such as designating some more established nodes as ‘ultra peers’ to route search requests and responses. While this doesn’t technically follow the flat model of P2P, it does mean the protocol is decentralized and so clients using it can’t be shut down by taking a server offline as happened with Napster.

If your bandwidth is metred, you may need to think carefully before using P2P networks as some clients require you to both download and upload data at the same time. In the case of larger files, this can rack up some pretty hefty internet charges, so make sure that you check the client requirements before downloading.

Staying on the level

If you’ve decided you want to access a P2P network, you can take some simple precautions to stay safe.

In the first place, make sure that the torrent client you’re using is from a reputable source.

Make sure that you also have a reliable firewall installed, so that even if a hacker discovers your IP address your device is safe.

Another way to stay safe is to consider using a virtual private network, known as a VPN when connected to a P2P network. VPNs - including free VPNs and the best VPNs for torrenting - create an encrypted tunnel through which data is sent. This not only hides your IP address but makes it almost impossible for anyone monitoring your connection to detect you’re using a P2P network.

There are VPN’s specifically designed for use with P2P but generally any provider can give you this level of protection, though some place limits on how much data you can download/upload.

Whichever VPN provider you choose, make sure that they have an effective kill switch. This means that if your connection to the VPN fails for any reason, your device won’t switch back to its previous unsecure connection, but simply block all internet access instead.
Peer-to-peer in review

Properly used, a P2P network can help you access shared resources like files in a much faster and more efficient way than regular downloads. While you remain responsible for making sure you do so in a safe and legal way, the benefits clearly outweigh the downsides.

Take some time to research the right client for you and make sure to keep your device and connection safe from snoopers through using a firewall and VPN.
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/what-is-p2p





HandBrake 1.6.0 Debuts AV1 Transcoding Support for the Masses
Mark Tyson

And its AV1 encoding can be hardware accelerated with Intel Quick Sync Video or Arc GPU hardware.

HandBrake, the popular free and open source video transcoder, has been updated to version 1.6.0. This major point upgrade is notable for facilitating AV1 video encoding for the first time in a general release. Moreover, those with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) enabled processors, and those with Intel Arc GPUs will be able to encode AV1 video with hardware acceleration.

HandBrake 1.6.0 can encode AV1 videos on any of its supported systems. In the current release its SVT-AV1 encoder offers the widest support, encoding on your processor through software. However, those with Intel QSV supporting CPUs or discrete Arc graphics can use the QSV-AV1 encoder for hardware accelerated processing. QSV isn't supported if your CPU is an ‘F’ suffixed model (i.e. it doesn't have an iGPU), or it is older than the Skylake generation. If you are lucky enough to have multiple QSV accelerators in your system, support for Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode should accelerate processing further. While AMD and Nvidia have AV1 encoders available for their latest GPUs, they currently aren’t integrated with HandBrake.

AV1 video is set to become the dominant codec across app-based streaming services and the wider internet, offering attractions such as; an open and royalty-free architecture, improved compression enabling efficient 8K video streaming, and support for the newest HDR standards. Developed by the Alliance for Open Media, the AV1 standard is expected to usurp the likes of H.264/AVC and HEVC, and it looks like a sure-fire winner with the support of tech giants like Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung.

Alongside the new AV1 transcoding support, the HandBrake developers have put together several 10-bit encoder profiles, and a handful of presets for dealing with typical AV1 encoding tasks. For those still interested in H.264 and H.265 encoding there are new profiles too. Meanwhile, a multitude of the app’s built in filters are updated in v1.6.0, with many of the updates implemented to support >8-bit color depths. The latest release notes on GitHub details all the above changes, as well as the updated libraries, and tweaks such as bug fixes on various platforms.

If you are interested in grabbing the latest HandBrake release to dabble in AV1 encoding, earlier versions of the transcoding utility are currently not seeing the update as available. Instead of waiting, you can head on over to the official downloads page and download and install or upgrade your existing version. HandBrake is available for Windows 10 or later, MacOS, and Linux.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ha...for-the-masses





Reverse Engineering Yet Another Ebook Format
Nemanja Mijailovic

In the distant past I was super into removing DRM from books and magazines (check out my posts on that topic: Removing Edge Magazine DRM, Removing Zinio DRM). This interest eventually faded away, mostly because I just stopped using websites that wouldn’t allow me to download and own the products I paid for (kudos to eBooks.com for doing the right thing).

Few weeks ago I decided to buy this book from Human Kinetics. Holding and reading a massive hardcover book before bedtime is not really my cup of tea, which is why I opted to buy it in digital form. The website wasn’t mentioning the format of their ebooks anywhere, so that instantly sounded the alarm in my head. On top of that, the book description said “Access Duration: 84 Months”, and that didn’t sound promising, either (7 years is generous, but anything less than forever is not generous enough in my book). Despite all the warning signs, I went ahead and bought the ebook. And as I had previously suspected, the download option was nowhere to be found. All I got was this

Gah, not the custom web viewer! Old me would have started reversing the website’s API immediately, but the new me didn’t want to waste any time on that, so I chose to simply ask for a refund. That turned out to be surprisingly difficult—it took me more than 10 minutes to find the refund instructions. I happily clicked the big “Check if your Ebook is eligible for a refund” button, entered my order code and then this happened:

• Please enter a valid Ebook code.
• The Ebook must have been purchased from a Human Kinetics online store.

Are you kidding me? Had this been a cheaper book, I would have just given up. But $82 is a lot of money in the book world! My old instincts kicked in and I decided it would be more fun to hack and blog for a week than to waste any time dealing with the customer support.

Maybe just print the book?

You know you are getting old when your first idea is “can’t I just print the book as PDF and move on with my life?”. Printing the webpage directly wouldn’t have worked, though, because all viewer controls would have been printed, too. But based on the looks of the page, I was pretty sure that part of it was an iframe that contained the actual content of the book. So I inspected the main HTML element in developer tools and found this:

There it was, the iframe with the raw HTML content of the book (more precisely, the current chapter)! I tried to print it and the results were pretty decent:

Finishing the job would have been simple: save all chapters of the book as PDF, then maybe even merge all of them into a single document. But part of me would have been ashamed of half-assing it like that (although I did create a mental note that the solution was good enough for all practical purposes, just in case I fail to find anything better). I was still curious to see if there was a way to retrieve the book in the original format, whatever that format was, so I continued my investigation.

Inspecting the network traffic

I had already figured out how to retrieve the HTML content of a single chapter. My next idea was to check how the viewer was getting URLs of all chapters, hoping that I would uncover some API that I could use to get the book metadata. I knew that the file name of the first chapter was E6372ch01_d78.html, so I looked at all network requests that came before fetching the chapter itself:

I examined all of these requests, and two of them stood out. Here is the entire container.xml file:

[code] <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<container xmlns="urnasis:names:tcpendocument:xmlns:container"
version="1.0">
<rootfiles>
<rootfile full-path="OPS/package.opf"
media-type="application/oebps-package+xml"/>
</rootfiles>
</container> [code]

And here are some interesting parts of package.opf:

 <item properties="nav" id="nav" href="nav.xhtml"
      media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
<item id="ncx" href="toc.ncx"
      media-type="application/x-dtbncx+xml"/>
<item id="d62e5275" href="xhtml/E6372ch01_d78.html"
      media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
<item id="d62e5292" href="xhtml/E6372ch02_d79.html"
      media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
<item id="d62e5310" href="xhtml/E6372ch03_d80.html"
      media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>

This started to resemble some ebook format, but I couldn’t recognize which (probably because I don’t know anything about ebook formats). But now I had two useful clues:

• Book metadata was packaged in .opf file format.
• Media type of that package was oebps-package+xml.

The next thing I did was search the web for “opf file format”. One of the top results was OPF (file format) page on Wikipedia, which redirected me to EPUB Open Packaging Format 2.0.1. Surprise, surprise, our website was using one of the most popular ebook formats! In retrospect, I could have expected this, but that’s easy to say after the fact. Anyway, now that I knew the format of my ebook, it was just a matter of figuring out how to combine all of its parts into a valid EPUB file.

Recreating the EPUB file

For a few minutes I was worried that I would have to gain a deep understanding of the EPUB format, but everything turned out to be way easier than I expected. Here is an example EPUB file structure from Wikipedia:

--ZIP Container--

 mimetype
META-INF/
  container.xml
OEBPS/
  package.opf
  chapter1.xhtml
  ch1-pic.png
  css/
    style.css
    myfont.otf

You can read the detailed format description on Wikipedia (I didn’t), but EPUB container is essentially just a ZIP file with three metadata files and a bunch of HTML pages:

• mimetype is always the string application/epub+zip.
• container.xml contains the reference to the .opf file.
• package.opf contains the book metadata.
• Everything else is the content of the book: HTML pages and their images, CSS styles, fonts, etc.

As we have seen previously, I already had all the metadata files. The remaining steps were to manually download all the resources, create the required file hierarchy and compress it into ZIP archive. Downloading the files was super easy, barely an inconvenience—it was just a matter of finding all href elements in the metadata. I wrote the code quickly, but I almost had a mini heart attack when the downloads started failing with authentication errors (package.opf was publicly accessible, but everything else was protected). Fortunately, the problem was easily solved by taking the HKPropel website cookie from the browser and sticking it into HTTP client’s headers. And that was it! Did it work? Sure it did

I don’t know if anyone else will ever need this tool, but it’s available on GitHub: HKPropel downloader. I haven’t written the usage instructions yet, though. If you want them, send me an email or open a GitHub issue, and I’ll be more than happy to write a nice README file for you.

Final thoughts

Unfortunately? That’s not the word I would use if I were selling EPUB books while denying my customers the right to actually own them! I understand that Human Kinetics is probably trying to prevent piracy, since their textbooks are really expensive, but I don’t think that making lives of paying users more difficult is a good way to accomplish that. After all, if someone doesn’t want to buy the book, they can easily download it from Library Genesis (even in superior PDF format, but don’t ask me how I know that).

Ebook publishers, please treat your customers fairly and allow them to download the books they gave you the money for. More importantly, allow me to retire from having to write the tools that bypass your restrictions.
https://mijailovic.net/2022/12/25/hkpropel/





Sherlock Holmes will Finally Escape Copyright this Weekend

Metropolis, To The Lighthouse, and the final Holmes stories are all entering the public domain.
Adi Robertson

Watching the copyrights on art expire still feels like a novelty. After all, the US public domain was frozen in time for 20 years, thawing only in 2019. But this weekend’s Public Domain Day will give our cultural commons a few particularly notable new works. As outlined by Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the start of 2023 will mark the end of US copyrights on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes stories — along with the seminal science fiction movie Metropolis, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the first full-length “talkie” film The Jazz Singer.

The public domain lets anyone republish, remix, or remake works without the permission of the rights holder — typically long after the original author is dead. In previous years it’s created booms around new interpretations of works like The Great Gatsby, which entered the public domain in 2021. More generally, you can thank it for Dracula Daily, a newsletter that creatively recontextualized the classic vampire novel, or its spiritual successor Whale Weekly about Moby Dick. And as the Duke summary points out, the public domain frees archivists to preserve and redistribute works that might otherwise be lost, like a wealth of silent films (including Metropolis) whose copyright is definitively expiring this year.

The Holmes news specifically also marks the end of a tortured legal debate about how copyright law should treat the character. Several of Doyle’s earlier works were already in the public domain before 2019, but the author’s estate argued this shouldn’t loosen its hold. That led to multiple legal tangles over unauthorized new Sherlock Holmes stories, including a now-settled suit against Netflix for its spinoff Enola Holmes. Now, if you were considering a new interpretation of the world’s greatest detective, there’s never been a better time to do it. Just spare a thought for Canada while you do it — thanks to a law issued earlier this year, it’s about to start its own 20-year freeze. And get ready for one of the biggest copyright landmarks of all next year: the public domain debut of Mickey Mouse.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/28/...omain-day-2023





Mickey’s Copyright Adventure: Early Disney Creation Will Soon Be Public Property

The version of the iconic character from “Steamboat Willie” will enter the public domain in 2024. But those trying to take advantage could end up in a legal mousetrap.
Brooks Barnes

There is nothing soft and cuddly about the way Disney protects the characters it brings to life.

This is a company that once forced a Florida day care center to remove an unauthorized Minnie Mouse mural. In 2006, Disney told a stonemason that carving Winnie the Pooh into a child’s gravestone would violate its copyright. The company pushed so hard for an extension of copyright protections in 1998 that the result was derisively nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

For the first time, however, one of Disney’s marquee characters — Mickey himself — is set to enter the public domain. “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 short film that introduced Mickey to the world, will lose copyright protection in the United States and a few other countries at the end of next year, prompting fans, copyright experts and potential Mickey grabbers to wonder: How is the notoriously litigious Disney going to respond?

“I’m seeing in Reddit forums and on Twitter where people — creative types — are getting excited about the possibilities, that somehow it’s going to be open season on Mickey,” said Aaron J. Moss, a partner at Greenberg Glusker in Los Angeles who specializes in copyright and trademark law. “But that is a misunderstanding of what is happening with the copyright.”

The matter is more complicated than it appears, and those who try to capitalize on the expiring “Steamboat Willie” copyright could easily end up in a legal mousetrap. “The question is where Disney tries to draw the line on enforcement,” Mr. Moss said, “and if courts get involved to draw that line judicially.”

Only one copyright is expiring. It covers the original version of Mickey Mouse as seen in “Steamboat Willie,” an eight-minute short with little plot. This nonspeaking Mickey has a rat-like nose, rudimentary eyes (no pupils) and a long tail. He can be naughty. In one “Steamboat Willie” scene, he torments a cat. In another, he uses a terrified goose as a trombone.

Later versions of the character remain protected by copyrights, including the sweeter, rounder Mickey with red shorts and white gloves most familiar to audiences today. They will enter the public domain at different points over the coming decades.

“Disney has regularly modernized the character, not necessarily as a program of copyright management, at least initially, but to keep up with the times,” said Jane C. Ginsburg, an authority on intellectual property law who teaches at Columbia University.

The expiration of the “Steamboat Willie” copyright means that the black-and-white short can be shown without Disney’s permission and even resold by third parties. (There may not be much sales value left, however. Disney posted it for free on YouTube years ago.) It also means that anyone can make use of the film and the original Mickey to further expression — to create new stories and artwork.
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Winnie the Pooh, another Disney property, offers a window into what could happen.

This year, the 1926 children’s book “Winnie-the-Pooh,” by A.A. Milne, came into the public domain. An upstart filmmaker has since made a low-budget, live-action slasher film called “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” in which the pudgy yellow bear turns feral. In one scene, Pooh and his friend Piglet use chloroform to incapacitate a bikini-clad woman in a hot tub and then drive a car over her head.

Disney has no copyright recourse, as long as the filmmaker adheres to the 1926 material and does not use any elements that came later. (Pooh’s recognizable red shirt, for instance, was added in 1930.) Fathom Events will give “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey,” directed by Rhys Waterfield, a one-day theatrical release in the United States on Feb. 15.

Here is where it gets tricky: Disney also holds trademarks on its characters, including the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse, and trademarks never expire as long as companies keep submitting the proper paperwork. A copyright covers a specific creation (unauthorized copying), but trademarks are designed to protect against consumer confusion — to provide consumers assurance about the source and quality of a creation.

Boiled down, any public domain use of the original Mickey cannot be perceived as coming from Disney, Ms. Ginsburg explained. This protection is strong, she added, because the character, even in his early form, has such close association with the company. People glance at those ears and smile and “automatically associate it with Disney,” she said.

In 2007, Walt Disney Animation Studios redesigned its logo to incorporate the “Steamboat Willie” mouse. It has appeared before every movie the unit has released since, including “Frozen” and “Encanto,” deepening the old character’s association with the company. (The logo is also protected by a trademark.) In addition, Disney sells “Steamboat Willie” merchandise, including socks, backpacks, mugs, stickers, shirts and collectibles.

“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” most likely does not run afoul of Disney’s trademarks because “no reasonable person would ever believe that Disney would authorize that kind of story,” Mr. Moss said. Pooh’s face is also slightly distorted in the film.

“Ever since Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in the 1928 short film ‘Steamboat Willie,’ people have associated the character with Disney’s stories, experiences and authentic products,” Disney said in a statement. “That will not change when the copyright in the ‘Steamboat Willie’ film expires.”

It added, “We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.”

The topic of Mickey Mouse and copyright has loomed in the public consciousness since the late 1990s, when Disney and other entertainment companies — and, notably, the estates of composers like George Gershwin — successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright protections. In many ways, Mickey has become the ultimate symbol of intellectual property, a character more well known than even Santa Claus, market researchers have said.

The 1998 copyright extension prompted a court fight, with detractors arguing that Congress disregarded the Constitution, which holds that copyright protection be given for a “limited” time. “Free the Mouse” bumper stickers began appearing, according to Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of a five-volume treatise on U.S. copyright law.

“Disney was no more active in pushing for the extension than anyone else, but they made for a convenient villain,” he said.

In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 to uphold what Congress had done. But the justices did so while holding their nose. “We are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion.

Disney lawyers and lobbyists likely determined long ago that pressing Congress for another extension would fail. “That last one is held in such bad, bad odor,” Mr. Goldstein said. “I don’t think there was any option to try and extend further.”

That means early versions of Popeye, King Kong, Donald Duck, Flash Gordon, Porky Pig and Superman will enter the public domain at various points over the next decade.

If there is anything that Disney takes more seriously than intellectual property, it is public image. In 2020, a Disney affiliate charged an elementary school $250 for showing “The Lion King” without permission at a P.T.A. fund-raiser. The media storm that followed was so intense that Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, apologized and said he would make a personal donation.

Our company @WaltDisneyCo apologizes to the Emerson Elementary School PTA and I will personally donate to their fund raising initiative.
— Robert Iger (@RobertIger) February 6, 2020

In the last decade, Disney has also had to contend with the rise of “creator culture,” Mr. Moss noted. Digital technology has allowed creativity and expression to flourish online, with YouTube vloggers, Instagram influencers, TikTokers and Twitter rabble-rousers incorporating intellectual property into new works.

That could pose a challenge for Disney when “Steamboat Willie” comes into the public domain. “They won’t be able to go after everyone,” Mr. Moss said. “Battle lines will have to be drawn.”

Ms. Ginsburg said she was watching closely to see if Disney and other entertainment companies tried to apply trademark law as a substitute for or extension of copyright — as she put it, “apply a separate protection to get to the same place.” In a Supreme Court intellectual property case from 2003 involving 20th Century Fox, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, warned of using trademarks to generate “a species of mutant copyright law.”

“This is a looming area,” Ms. Ginsburg said. “We’re on the cusp of a time when copyrights in a range of visual works will expire.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/b...ic-domain.html





Strike 3 Holdings Copyright Infringement Defense Tips
Steve Vondran

Introduction

Strike 3 Holdings (S3”) has filed THOUSANDS of copyright infringement lawsuits, and usually manages to settle quite a few of them. However, they do not always prevail in their bringing of these actions (usually in a federal court lawsuit). There are times they have had to dismiss cases.

When a person gets the so-called “love letter” from their ISP notifying them that their I.P. address was used to download and share their movies without permission, and setting a deadline for the subscriber to raise any objections or to seek to quash the subpoena, (not generally an effective strategy for federal court cases), it can become very stressful to understand what happened, what your rights are, and to consider if there are any defenses to copyright infringement or other mitigating factors. This blog contains some important things to note.

Are there defenses to allegations of illegal file sharing copyrighted movies?

There are several instances where raising the proper defense against Strike 3 Holdings can help you avoid paying their large settlement demands (which can be as high as $50,000). Here are a few items to think of for anyone caught in their IP enforcement web. This company files HUNDREDS upon HUNDREDS of lawsuits each year and will likely hit the 10,000 case filings mark next year.

Case review - Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. John Doe (73.225.38.130) - I am not the downloader.

In Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. John Doe (73.225.38.130) in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington is a case concerning copyright infringement. Strike 3 Holdings sued “John Doe” for downloading and sharing their films without permission. The court granted Strike 3 Holdings' motion for expedited discovery and allowed them to subpoena the Doe's internet service provider (ISP) to learn his identity. The court also denied Doe's motion to quash the subpoena, finding that Doe failed to demonstrate how the requested information was overly broad, unduly burdensome, or harassing. This is how each BitTorrent case typically starts.

However, in this case, the Defendant denied any file sharing of their digital content and disputed their claims and filed a counterclaim for declaratory judgment for non-infringement of copyright.

As the case progressed, Strike 3 decided to dismiss their case (apparently realizing they had the wrong person). The court agreed to their dismissal request, but also stated that Defendants counterclaim was NOT DISMISSED and was still active.

The counterclaim was for declaratory judgment of non-infringement. Thereafter, the court ruled for the Defendant on their claim, and ordered Plaintiff to pay their attorney fees. In a copyright action, the attorney-fee clause is a two-way street. Whoever prevails in the litigation can seek their reasonable attorney fees. Strike 3 appealed but the decision was affirmed on appeal.

So, I did not do it is the best defense, but as noted, they may force you into litigation and force you to incur fees to prove your innocence. Not everyone wants to go to court however and most cases will settle without proceeding to discovery.

As observed by the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth, the method of identifying copyright infringers by IP address is “famously flawed” for a variety of reasons, including:

• IP address spoofing;
• the existence of unsecured routers;
• the ability of malware to crack passwords or open backdoors;
• the sharing of IP addresses among family members, roommates, guests, neighbors, and others;
• and the random assignment of IP addresses to a general location if a more specific one cannot be identified by geolocation services. See Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, 351 F. Supp. 3d 160, 162 (D.D.C. 2018);
• Moreover, dynamic IP addresses might be reassigned to many different individuals during a short timeframe, and these frequent changes create a significant chance of misidentification. See Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, 2019 WL 5446239 at *11 (D.N.J. Oct. 24, 2019).

These are some other things that should be reviewed in every case.

Other potential defenses to review in file-sharing litigation:

• Statute of limitations (generally three years from the date of discovery)
• Movies that did not download
• Deminimis downloads (so small as to be unrecognizable)
• Fair use might also be worth looking at
• Your kids friends did the downloads
• You can prove you were out of town during the downloads
• Challenging Strike 3’s alleged evidence with a Cobbler Nevada challenge, forcing them to prove “additional evidence” showing that the internet subscriber to the account (ex. Comcast, Cox, Verizon, AT&T and others) is also plausible to be the downloader.
• Challenge to the geolocation technology (see below)

Strike 3 has raised concerns to various courts throughout the country

Courts around the nation have expressed increasing concerns that, given the nature of the films at issue, defendants may feel coerced to settle these suits merely to prevent public disclosure of their identifying information, even if they believe they have been misidentified. See, e.g., Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, No. 2:18-cv-00824-CB, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130803, 2018 WL 3688415, at *1 n.2 (W.D. Pa. Aug. 3, 2018).

("Of particular concern is the possibility that the names and addresses that the service providers will connect to the IP addresses identified in the complaint may not be those of the individuals who actually downloaded the film."); Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, No. 18-cv-2648-VEC, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 587, 2019 WL 78987, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 2, 2019) ("As numerous district courts in this Circuit have pointed out, copyright holders such as Plaintiff are repeat litigants who have, in the past, engaged in 'abusive litigation practices,' including coercive settlement practices."); Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, No. 1:18-cv-2205-RC-GMH, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 182800, 2018 WL 5297816, at *2 (D.D.C. Oct. 25, 2018).

("[T]here is a real risk that a defendant might be falsely identified and forced to defend themselves against unwarranted allegations or that an innocent defendant may be coerced into an unjust settlement with the plaintiff to prevent the dissemination of publicity surrounding unfounded allegations.")
Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, No. 3:21-cv-993 (MPS), 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 196955, at *2-3 (D. Conn. Oct. 13, 2021) – Geolocation technology challenges?

At least one district court recently concluded that the "geolocation technology" that Strike 3 uses to identify alleged infringers' IP addresses, (See Compl., ECF No. 1 ¶ 9), is too imprecise to identify the particular individual who downloaded or distributed the content in question. See Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, 351 F. Supp. 3d 160, 162 (D.D.C. 2018) ("This [geolocation] method is famously flawed:

• virtual private networks and onion routing spoof IP addresses (for good and ill);
• routers and other devices are unsecured;
• malware cracks passwords and opens backdoors;
• multiple people (family, roommates, guests, neighbors, etc.) share the same IP address;
• a geolocation service might randomly assign addresses to some general location if it cannot more specifically identify another

See Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, No. 3:21-cv-993 (MPS), 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 196955, at *3-4 (D. Conn. Oct. 13, 2021). These are still more defenses to consider in defending the accused downloader.

Conclusion

This blog scratches the surface on legal concepts that may be important in defending Strike 3 Holdings, LLC copyright infringement claims. Our firm has handled hundreds of these cases and saved our clients millions of dollars in settlements over the years. Strike 3 employes a team of regional copyright lawyers who bring these federal court cases in states such as California, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Florida and other states.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/st...right-2706762/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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