s the judge said no judge howard lloyd said the court realizes that this decision may frustrate plaintiffs and other copyright holders who quite understandably wish to curtail online infringement of their work so unfortunately it would appear that the technology that enables copyright infringement. pardon me has outpaced technology that prevents it earlier i spoke to aaron swartz executive director and founder of demand progress i asked him if this ruling meant it california residents were free to download whatever they want here's his response. i don't think it's quite that broad but what it is is one of a number of cases where companies have been trying to use the law to go on fishing expeditions to take a whole series of ip addresses that they collected you know somewhat mysterious and unknown ways and they say are allegedly infringing copyright and they asked the government and they asked the courts to use those ip addresses to get all sorts of private information about people without any real showing of evidence that those people have done anything wrong and what we've seen is a numbe

northern california they didn't quite get the stamp of approval to hunt down the pirates in person judge howard lloyd said that he would permit the discovery the judicial term for identifying individuals if the company showed good cause by proving that the person is real and if the company identified all the steps that were used to find out person that is the thing hard drive didn't quite meet the requirements judge lloyd called the company's monitoring process a fishing exercise went on so explain that just because he has the account holders name does not mean that the account holder was the one stealing the video and when president the judge the company admitted that the geo location tracker used to find the infringers most reliable but only for determining which country the addresses in not which state which is exactly what the judge would need since as a district court ruling now obviously the hard drive productions case fell apart and the judge denied their request to find the people saying the following the court recognizes that plaintive is aggrieved by the apparent infringement and is sympath

s the judge said no judge howard lloyd said the court realizes that this decision may frustrate plaintiff and other compu right holders who quite understandably wish to curtail online infringement of their works unfortunately it would appear that the technology that enables compu right infringement had outpaced technology that prevents it. i want to bring in andrew blake one of the writers on our team tag team to talk about that then my first question is that i ask you this i think this is the question on everyone's mind i mean does this mean that we can now download whatever we want never really been able to download if we want it's certainly a good step in the right direction but i would even go as far as to say that it's good news it's more of just not bad news and when you say it's up in the right direction obviously it's not a step in the right direction for music companies and movie companies important companies who want to keep their products you know for sale instead they're just going to keep getting their products distributed to a wider and wider audience and usually people are