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Anti-Piracy Group Violates Swiss Law to Track File Sharing

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the define-zealot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Another fight appears to be brewing in Switzerland over how file sharers are identified. Logistep, a company that specializes in anti-piracy by collecting computer evidence against file sharers for use in lawsuits, seems to have taken an end run around Swiss law in order to try and settle cases out of court. 'Under Swiss law, the identity of a subscriber to an ISP (Internet service provider) can only be revealed during the course of a criminal case, not a civil one, Schaefer said. The IP (Internet Protocol) address of a computer controlled by the subscriber is considered "personal" information. In order to try to claim damages from people suspected of trading songs or movies, Logistep has asked Swiss prosecutors to open criminal cases, Schaefer said. As the criminal cases progresses, Logistep receives information from prosecutors that identifies the file sharer.'"

4 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Swiss law is broken by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    if someone can attack you on the internet, and there is no way to identify who the attacker is to file a lawsuit against the person. This goes for other things besides file sharing, such as libel.

  2. EU law too. by oliverthered · · Score: 2, Informative

    IP addresses have just been made private data under EU law too, don't know how that affects civil law cases though

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    1. Re:EU law too. by DJ+Decay · · Score: 3, Informative

      Switzerland is not in the EU, so it probably doesn't have much of an effect.

  3. Re:Kickbacks by gnasher719 · · Score: 2, Informative

    You gotta wonder whether and how much money changed hands to make these criminal cases happen. None. All they have to do is go to the police, claim that their copyrights have been infringed to some degree that would make it criminal, and then the police would be supposed to investigate. They tried exactly the same thing in Germany. The only difference apparently was that the German police and judges quickly figured out that the record companies didn't have any intention whatsoever to actually follow through with the roughly 10,000 criminal cases that they wanted the police to investigate, so in Germany the police decided that they have better things to do than wasting their time on filesharers.