That all said, “people who are stealing intellectual property” isn’t a protected class anyway, so Eve can do whatever it wants to, to the degree the market tolerates it.

That doesn’t mean much though, they still can — just like any private company can refuse service to (basically) anyone they want to, for (basically) any reason at all

Thanks for offering your experience and understanding to us.

At least in the U.S., I think what you mean by “basically” is that there are some exceptions. I am under the impression that I can’t refuse to sell cigarettes to women or African-Americans at my convenience store, for example. IANAL, so I could be totally wrong. But is this set of exceptions a problem for MMO companies who want to apply very broad and (sometimes) arbitrary rules to who gets to play their game?

To expound upon this, and since we’re talking about torrents, there was an old private tracker I was a member of that had a rule that you were locked into your IP for six months and were only allotted 3 IPs at once. No one complained about this rule, so I must assume it was a non-factor for most people. Given I believe most of us were American or Canadian.

That’s not what EVE is doing here though. If they’re really doing it at all, they’re just matching download IP addresses with user IP addresses (which they have) and that is definitely a bit chancy. Like you said, we’ll see. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

And I don’t think you get a subpoena only to ban someone from your game (correct me, if I’m wrong, I do not know much about US laws). I very much presume you have to try to sue them for — maybe — copyright infringement or for unlawfully decompiling stuff (would that fall under DMCA?). And there wasn’t any mentioning of sueing people.

Anyway, we will see what happens. I bet nothing at all, as there might be no real potential for exploits with the decompiled client. I very much suspect EVE would already be an exploiters paradise for years if there was considerable potential for misuse, because it is hardly imaginable that this hype is the first time that the idea of looking under the hood of the EVE client occured to some evildoer.

That said, what EVE is probably doing (since it hasn’t had time to run through the legal proceedings, which involve filing a lawsuit first, and still take months) is match up IPs at login with IPs at download. If there’s a match, there’s a pretty high liklihood that it’s the guy, and if not, so what? The odds on the guy who had the address a few minutes ago also being an EVE player are so low that they just take the chance.

Nonsense.

Explanation: at least in germany (and most likely in most other countries) a DSL router is being dynamically assigned a public IP address once it connects. The actual address comes from a pool of IP addresses available to the provider. Every 24 hours the line gets disconnected only to be immediately reconnected by the user’s router. It then is being assigned a different IP address from the pool mentioned above. Some users prefer to have a static IP address assigned, but that costs extra and so not much of these accounts are around. And it isn’t difficult at all to get oneself assigned a new – different – IP address.

Thanks. That’s pretty much what I assumed on the criminal side and what I was afraid of on the civil side. I didn’t really expect there to be a specific torrent example but I’m surprised that the over arching concept of civil entrapment doesn’t have a specific precedent yet.