If You Don’t Believe Me You Can Ask John Doe

So I know I’m supposed to finish my missive about compliance by certain service providers with certain subpoenas that seek to unmask John Doe defendants…and I will get back to that. In the interim, I came across an interesting (and tangentially relevant) development out of law and technology powerhouse Oklahoma. In another flare-up in the ongoing assault by the record insustry against its (potential) customers, Arista Records issued a subpoena to non-party Oklahoma State University seeking to unmask a number of John Does who had made use of the University computer network. Arista’s complaint is pretty much standard fare. What’s interesting here is the defendants response, which challenged the fitness of IP address information as a means of uniquely identifying individuals or individual machines. Check it out — it raises some interesting questions about the way defendants are identified in these types of lawsuits.

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