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Danish Anti-Piracy Organization Bills P2P Users
faaaz writes "The danish anti-piracy organisation Antipiratgruppen has billed approximately 150 p2p users an amount of up to $14,000 each for sharing copyrighted material. The organisation says 'Pay up, or we'll sue!'" There's also a Reuters article.
In the instructions made to install Kazaa (Full)without adware (cydoor, et al), one of the things to do was to delete the ~/KaZaa/db folder and replace that with a dummy file by opening notepad and saving a blank file as "db" (no extention). As a result of this, all downloaded files in (~/Kazaa/My Shared Files) would appear to have "failed" in Kazaa, and the downloaded files would remain in their *.dat files. It would also NOT include them in your list of files shared. You'd then have to rename the files with extentsions before exiting Kazaa or else you'd lose them.
So...if you want to download on P2P you could probably take these measures and be okay
$cat
Settlments in lieu of lawsuits are quite common and perfectly legal in the US, and most other countries I'd suspect.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
No.
From the article:
"If they pay now - and delete the illegal content from their hard drives - then the amount is cut in half and they avoid going to court. Those who don't pay up are to be sued."
"3) which family member used the computer?"
This isn't like a motor vehicle; the person who owns the ISP account is responsible for how it's used. This is why a company can be liable for its employees' copyright infringment.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
This is a civil case, not a criminal case. They do not have to prove beyond all reasonable doubt, just in all probability.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Actually they not only log each channel change, but power on/off, and the volume/mute changes done through your converter (Of course not the volume/mute done through a TV)
All of this data is sent back along the cable feed to their log server in real time.
A simple call to tech support with a problem will prove this, as when they ask you do to something such as change a channel, they will tell YOU when you did it or if you didnt do it right.
In addition, they can also feed commands into your converter to change its channel, power settings, etc.
Each converter has a serial number on it that is tied to a household/billing account.
If you ever call and report your name they log that with which converter at the time you called about as well, so if you only call for one and your buddy calls for another, they can narrow it down to who has which converter as well (Thou they dont really use that particular data, its more of a note than anything.)
A simple notch filter on the cable line can block these signals, but dont expect any help from tech support if you do that. They will tell you they arnt getting a reply from your converter and something must be wrong with the connection to it, most likely dispatching a technition to fix the problem locally.
Officially they claim to only use these logs for trouble shooting, but its also been proven they use them to watch for cable pirates.
If you continuously change to channels you dont get and Watch those channels for any amount of time, yet you dont pay for them or havent orderd the pay per view show, it sets off flags that alerts them.
This is why 'test boxes' that are just descramblers also include these notch filters.
As far as the cable co can see from one of those, the converter isnt even hooked up to their network.
Of course, as others have pointed out: 1) These guys are not the copyright holders and thus have no standing to demand payment, and 2) They have no proof that these are illegal copies. But what do they care? If I wasn't encumbered with ethics, I might try this scam myself. Then again, if I wasn't encumbered with ethics I'd be spamming you all with ads to my porn sites.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Don't you mean 4:33?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
- IFPI - The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
- NCB - Nordic Copyright Bureau
- DMF danish site - Danish Musician Union. some english info
- DAF - Danish Artist Union
In addition, the members of APG isQuote from the site:
The transfer of rights to NCB is organised in the following way: rights owners in the Nordic countries and the Baltic States transfer all their rights to the national performing rights society. This society administers the performing rights and transfers the mechanical rights to NCB. Thus, NCB represents virtually all copyrighted music in the Nordic and Baltic areas in connection with recording and the manufacture and distribution of copies of recordings.
So this is basically a group representing many, if not all copyright holders for the material in question
Well, speaking as a guy who actually lives in Denmark.....
Since Summer 2001, various forms of digital copying have been legal in Denmark. Before that, Danish law on this area bore obvious marks of being written by people who had no idea what the whole thing was all about (prohibiting all forms of digital copying without prior permission -- bye bye Internet :) ). The laws are confusing, though. According to Forbrugerrådet (the "Consumer's Council" -- I'm not sure if you Americans have a similar organization), Danish citizens are allowed to:
We are not allowed to:
(from Forbrugerrådet's web page)
I hope this helps shed a little light on the situation.
Six sick
A Danish Law from April 2001 actually makes this possible.
It gives the copyright holders the right to collect evidence and present this to a judge. The judge then issues a warrant based on the evidence (yes no 3rd party is involved). The warrant can be for a house search or in this case to get information from a isp based on the ip's they collected. The law has been used to raid netparties as well.
The problem is that all this happens outside the criminal courts, they run all the cases as civil law suites.
I hope they stepped over the line, and that our silly goverment that doesn't know a power button from the reset button, changes this absurd law.
Look a pig that flies (sponsered by S O N Y)