[daks001]

Michael Scott points us to the news that a French court has ruled that an IP address is not enough to identify a single individual. Now, obviously, many of us agree with this general point, and we've brought that up time and time again in the past when lawsuits insisted that a single IP address was enough to identify a user. And, given that France now has its three strikes law which will be based in large part on entertainment companies indicating a single IP address as evidence of infringement, this might seem like a good ruling. But in this case, there's another side to it which is important. The reason why the court ruled that an IP address doesn't identify an individual, is to say that it is not a privacy violation to get someone's IP address.

This isn't a new issue. We discussed a similar case before, and I actually think, on the whole, it's correct. An IP address shouldn't be considered private information directly, since it doesn't identify a individual and you effectively have to give it out just to use the internet. But for people who argue that revealing IP addresses is a violation of confidential information, they might not like this ruling very much. On the whole, though, I think in the long run it's better to have a world where the courts recognize that an IP address does not identify a user, even if it means that IP addresses aren't considered private info.




http://www.techdirt....004518296.shtml

[snmp_rape]

agreed!
modified modem can have an ip that cant be identified directly.

[daks001]

And how many users can share one WAN IP behind a router....

You can have a stock cable modem and then change the mac on the router or computer connected to it and reboot your modem and then have a new IP address on most ISP networks. So an IP address is meaningless without a time associated to it's usage and then assuming the ISP does not have any error's in their customer database.....