Its nice to see the courts acting sensibly when confronted by poor evidence.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170420/10245137198/singapore-court-tosses-copyright-troll-cases-because-ip-addresses-arent-good-enough-evidence.shtml We've been saying this for years, but IP addresses are not good enough evidence on which to base copyright infringement lawsuits. At some level, everyone already knows this to be true. You can tell that's the case because the typical pretenders stating otherwise are the copyright trolls with a business model that relies on gathering large numbers of supposedly infringing IP addresses, mailing out settlement demands to the supposed pirates that own the accounts of those IP addresses, and then collecting very real money from some percentage of the recipients. On top of that, even these trolls will often claim that the onus is on the account holder of an internet connection to police their own pipe, which is a delightful end-around to the common concept of punishing true infringers as opposed to innocent third parties.
It's an important decision in the country, with the High Court cementing the position that IP addresses are not sufficient evidence with which to demand account information over infringement issues. That the practical use for that account information would have been the type of sleazy settlement demands that have become the norm in copyright trolling circles may have played a role in the decision, but it need not have. Viewed solely on its merits, there are any number of ways an internet connection might be used for copyright infringement by someone other than the owner of the internet account: shared WiFi, brute force break-ins into the connection, etc. The simple fact is that knowing an IP address that was used for infringement doesn't tell anyone who did the actual infringing. Viewed that way, compelling ISPs to turn over personal account information based solely on IP addresses is crazy.
You all know my feelings on this matter, abusing the legal system to obtain money by extortion is an area of the law the legal fraternity needs to clean up its act in, theres little chance of that in some countries dominated by high priced lawyers but each common sense judgement chips away at the tool-set used by such abusers and will in the end render them null and void.
