NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Questions Regarding Italian Media Piracy Watchdog's Court Data in ISP Case
Questions Regarding Italian Media Piracy Watchdog's Court Data in ISP Case Greetings. This story is still in progress, but it has the potential to be quite interesting. While it has gotten a small bit of coverage in the Italian press in the last couple of days, I've been briefed directly by sources in Italy who have been closely following the case and I'll try to explain the best that I can based on my understanding of the situation. FAPAV is an Italy-based group focused on fighting music and film piracy. They recently went to court against Italy's largest ISP (Telecom Italia), claiming that the ISP wasn't doing enough to stop illegal sharing of copyrighted works on the Internet (the trial proper apparently has not actually commenced). However, in the course of evidentiary filings, FAPAV appears to have provided the court with extremely detailed statistics regarding illicit user downloads of various films, including, reportedly, downloaders' IP address information. Observers of this evidentiary material are questioning how FAPAV obtained these statistics in the first place. In Italy -- as explained to me -- IP addresses are considered to be personal information, and illicit collection of IP addresses would likely be a civil offense. But FAPAV's data, which also reportedly includes information about specific films, etc. downloaded by specific IP addresses, seems to enter into the realm of Internet traffic content. Illicit access to that tier of data would apparently be considered to be essentially wiretapping (spying) and would likely be a criminal offense in Italy (depending on specifics). Since the ISP apparently did not release any of this data to FAPAV, from whom and how did FAPAV get the data, given that they presumably were not themselves running a site providing the films to pirates? Some outside observers in Italy have speculated that FAPAV may have been involved in the use of planted spyware techniques to collect the information. Alternatively, another possibility suggested is that FAPAV may have simply fabricated the data for the court. It seems to me that yet another possible explanation (which specifics of the case may help endorse or rule out) might be that FAPAV or their agents collected unencrypted tracker data from P2P sharing nodes (by "participating" in the associated P2P networks themselves), or obtained logs of that data. However, due to Italy's rather strict privacy laws, either of these possibilities may also be legally problematic -- I'll leave that to experts on Italian laws to ponder. I know of no official response by FAPAV regarding this yet -- the Italian courts have just come off of their holiday recess. That's my understanding of where this stands. Yes, interesting ... --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator