TMG sues 'hacker' of P2P pirates' IP addresses

French IT services provider Trident Media Guard has taken legal action to prosecute the person who boasted that he or she had found a security flaw in one of its servers containing the IP addresses of internet users who engage in illicit P2P downloads. TMG CEO Alain Guislain confirmed to Ouest France newspaper that civil servants from France's data protection agency, Cnil, were at his company's offices in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire, near Nantes, to evaluate the security breach. He added that the business he formed in 2006 was the only one enabled by Cnil to provide this service to France's anti-piracy authority on behalf of copyright holders. Le Monde reports that French courts seldom prosecute hackers who expose lax security, as this is deemed to be in the public interest. There still is ambiguity about the legality of publishing precise details of security flaws and whether accessing a completely unsecured computer constitutes hacking or not. A jurisprudence-setting decision was handed down by a French court of first instance but a subsequent appeal is still in the hands of the judiciary. As previously reported, the authority to combat online piracy and promote legal content offer, which is known by the acronym Hadopi, has stopped taking automatic feeds from TMG. The regulator's chief, Eric Walter, told Le Monde that for the time being TMG will provide it with the same data, but on physical support. It is unclear whether it will be via CD-ROM, flash memory or another technology.