I believe it.

Just two months ago I received one of these letters alleging I downloaded a game over BitTorrent, showing an IP address and how many bytes of the file I supposedly seeded.

Problem was it wasn't my IP and I had never heard of the game. I had to fax Comcast's "Security" department to verify that the IP address in question had never been assigned to a modem on my account...

Yet Comcast told the copyright holder I was their John Doe.

As an aside - what do you do to keep track of your IP? I have a consumer-grade router (running Tomato firmware) between "the world" and myself, so the router actually gets the IP.

Is there some automated solution to keep track of this?

Thanks.

I've had Comcast at 5 different apartments and only once did my IP address ever change while living at the same address, after a prolonged maintenance period when they ran new physical cables in my neighborhood.

The IPs are semi-static, and I would notice immediately if my IP changed since I have deny requests from any IP but my own to several webpages of mine.

Plus the IP address in the copyright infringement notice had a rdns hostname corresponding to an entirely different state.

I've got Qwest/CenturyLink and they change my IP quite frequently. A month ago they were changing it once a week. In the early evening (9-10 PM local time).

Dynamic dns effectively keeps track of it, but it won't record it: http://dyn.com/dns/dyndns-free/

On a sidenote, one way to get a new IP is to go into the router control panel and change that MAC address.

None of these 200,000 actually went to court. It is fairly inexpensive to mail a letter.

That is the claim, since 2010.

Now, modify the number to account for average household size.

One out of every 1200 Internet users (source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+internet+user...)

The real question is why do you think that can't be right? It's too high? I'm surprised it hasn't happened to one of my friends.

Looking at the spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B8oEqWOAwM3SM2Y1Y2NmNWMtY2M...) It seems that it is mostly people who download porn. And Hurt Locker, Cry, and Expendables

> The real question is why do you think that can't be right? It's too high? I'm surprised it hasn't happened to one of my friends.

Exactly my initial thought. But now that I think about it, at 1 in 1200, I'm not surprised that it hasn't happened to one of my friends, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened to one of my friends.