As most of you know this company has already been slammed for its sloppy practices by european courts, here though is some more info on exactly how sloppy this company is.
http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2007/02/big-media-dmca-notices-guilty-until.htmlIt's no secret that media companies have started to hire companies such as BayTSP to automatically find file sharers and send letters to their ISPs. The goal of this is to use fear to persuade people to use legal methods of getting digital content.
I decided to investigate the reliability of notices from companies such as BayTSP. The answer: the companies do not actually gather the data they claim to. Their standards for sending DMCA notices are very low.
If your ISP forwards a DMCA notice from these guys, point them here. This research suggests that they have no evidence of wrong-doing. If ISPs learn that the folks sending them DMCA notices are not being completely honest, they may be willing to reconsider their position about how they respond to the notices. The people I work with at Carnegie Mellon seemed willing to reevaluate their policies given this evidence. I believe that ISPs should require that any peer-to-peer related DMCA notice include a statement regarding exactly what evidence of sharing was found. Ideally, the notice should contain evidence that could be corroborated with log files (for example, "we found that the client at 123.1.2.3 uploaded 1 MB of file X to 4.3.2.1". The ISP may be able to check that there was 1 MB of traffic between these two clients).
I can confirm they try this same sort of lazy method on many of the other p2p networks, they will initiate a search for one of their clients titles and merely log the IP,s on results, not even bothering to confirm if the file is genuine in most cases, and yet they will walk into court if asked and swear they have made all the relevant tests to satisfy the law, I hope the next time they do they will be able to explain their sloppy methods to the Judge and I,m sure he will give their evidence the "heresay" weight it deserves.
