[Ninjalawyer]

In the U.S., record companies and movie studios have promoted the technological fiction for years that you can identify a particular person by an IP address. They make that argument because it is necessary to do so legally; it's not enough to say that the account holder's IP was involved in infringement so the account holder is responsible, they are required to establish that the account holder actually infringed.

I don't usually agree with HarryT, but I wouldn't be opposed to having an account holder responsible if the penalties were restricted to reasonable fines rather than massive fines and criminal sanctions, and provided the person accused had some meaningful way to dispute the claim. Seems like a fairly reasonable compromise.