Eric Goldman recently visited Grokster’s website at www.grokster.com and got the following stern warning:
The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed
that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.
Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files
using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is
prosecuted by copyright owners.There are legal services for downloading music and movies.
This service is not one of them.YOUR IP ADDRESS IS [redacted] AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous.
Hilarious. Eric questions their interpretation of the MGM v. Grokster Supreme Court ruling, while a commenter notes that sites like this are quite useful to those wondering what their IP address is.
Of course, just about every website keeps server logs of visitors, including their IP address, but I wonder who actually is running the site now and is trying to put the fear of God in me about no being anonymous anymore. A WHOIS lookup reveals the following registrant:
Domain Name: GROKSTER.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.tucows.com
Name Server: NS2.EV1SERVERS.NET
Name Server: NS1.EV1SERVERS.NET
Status: ACTIVE
EPP Status: ok
Updated Date: 04-Sep-2006
Creation Date: 21-Dec-1999
Expiration Date: 21-Dec-2006
Anyone familiar with these folks and their connection to Grokster?