‘The Motion Picture Association of America said it filed 286 lawsuits against people around the United States based on information acquired from file-trading sites shut down earlier in the year. Most of those sites were hubs connecting people using the BitTorrent technology, a peer-to-peer application designed for speeding downloads of large files’:

As with previous lawsuits filed by the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America, this round of cases is aimed at anonymous “John Does” identified only by their Internet addresses. The defendants’ true identities will be sought through a later court process.

Essentially the MPAA is relying on server logs netted during last year’s Operation Bucaneer to establish wilful infringement. This is problematic. First, BitTorrent websites only offer for download lists of peers (the .torrent file), not the copyrighted works themselves. The lists, being automatically compiled by a computer program, are not subject to copyright, and users who download the .torrent file will not necessarily go on to obtain the full file (or even a substantial portion of it).

Second, even if investigators were able to combine the record of a .torrent file download with an ISP logfile, it’s unlikely that proof could be established to the required degree (balance of probabilities). IP addresses are surprisingly easy to spoof, and such is indeed a common practice amongst filesharers. The computer might not even be under the control of the registered ISP subscriber: so-called ‘zombie’ computers are often used to download files on behalf of third party hackers.

And if you thought the evidentiary case looked thin, the supporting agitprop is even weaker than usual:

“Internet movie thieves be warned: You have no friends in the online community when you are engaging in copyright theft,” MPAA Senior Vice President John Malcom said in a statement.

Google begs to differ.