Have anybody discussed how this[0] could complicate things?
The developer of the popular tracker, Opentracker, has built in a feature where it throws in bogus but real IPs when you ask for seeders.
It reduces efficiency for people who are trying to download from seeders that don't exist, but also introduces deniability because if you ask the tracker for a list of seeders your IP being on that list could reasonably explained as it being one of the bogus IPs.
To verify that your IP is actually seeding you have to connect and try to download from it, but does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation?
> ... does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation?
No.
It certainly wouldn't be entrapment and it's not "a crime" for you to download files that you own the copyright for (or, in these types of situations, have been granted permission by the copyright owner -- whom you would typically be working on behalf of -- to download).
In my opinion, the addition of the "bogus IPs" is pretty pointless. Once you've gathered a list of seeders, it's trivial to actually connect to them and verify that they are sharing (portions of) the file.
In fact, I would think you'd have to do that in order to be able to affirm that the file was, in fact, being "shared". You couldn't honestly state that it was if you didn't verify that to be true.
I can't recall the name of it now but the firm that does this stuff on behalf of HBO (or did, when I worked at an ISP and received e-mails from them) connects to the "seeders" and downloads (part of) the file(s) from them to verify that they're actually illegally sharing copyrighted content.
I agree with you in spirit but part of the reason copyright trolling even still exist is down to the fact that many judges presiding over the cases lack even a basic understanding of how any of it works.
An IP is a terrible way to identify someone and the judges who actually know a thing or two have already learned that.
The copyright trolling industry has worked its hardest to try and goose the legal process in their favor at all junctures and the reality is most judges just don’t have the knowledge to properly adjudicate these cases so the technical nuance of bogus IPs just doesn’t matter. In most cases the copyright trolls just make declarative statements about what their tech discovered. Some cases by more informed defendants have been tossed because they were unwilling to disclose how the data was collected.
Ultimately if you stand up to the copyright trolls, they usually stand down. It’s not worth them to actually fight. They’re hoping for the drive-by payout.
Unfortunately for humanity, and to great joy among trolls and three letter agencies, IPv6 is by construction (perhaps accidentally but that doesn’t natter) an excellent way in practice to identify a device, household and therefore a person (or small liable group)
Non of the ISPs in my area are offering IPv6 prefix randomization - if I want not to be correlated, I need to switch ISPs. I am staying with IPv4 for now.
It reduces efficiency for people who are trying to download from seeders that don't exist, but also introduces deniability because if you ask the tracker for a list of seeders your IP being on that list could reasonably explained as it being one of the bogus IPs.
To verify that your IP is actually seeding you have to connect and try to download from it, but does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation?
[0]: http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniabili...