Slashdot Mirror
London Lawyers Demand £600 For One Game
Barence writes "A PC Pro reader has received a demand for a £600 out-of-court settlement from lawyers claiming to have forensic evidence that he illegally downloaded a PC game on BitTorrent. The law firm, Davenport Lyons, is acting on the behalf of German games distributor Zuxxez, creator of the game in question, Two Worlds. The PC Pro reader was given no prior warning to stop file sharing, unlike the usual 'three strikes and you're out' approach adopted by the music industry. The reader says, 'To add insult to injury it [Davenport Lyons] didn't pay enough postage on the letter and I had to collect it from the sorting office at a cost of £1.30. This also used up most of the two weeks that it allowed for a response.'"
Perhaps I need to RTFA a bit more closely, but I thought the logic (for lack of a better term) behind the RIAA/MPAA's claims of thousands of $$$ per item was because that was a rough estimate of the amount they've lost based on the number of people that downloaded said item from them (So at say $15 per film, they're saying that 20,000 people will have downloaded it, thus $30,000), but it seems they're demanding he pay £600 for the game itself, not what they'd lost due to him distributing it?
I don't see how that works at all, surely the most he should be liable for is the £40 the game could cost? Or better yet, the £10 or whatever it is that the DEVELOPERS lost out on?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I would absolutely agree that they've demonstrated incompetence at best, and have wilfully wasted time before the deadline at worst - to me this throws into question a lot of things about their case. Where did the evidence come from, for example? I've actually been wondering about that for a while when people are found to have 'x' infringing content on their machine; how do the lawyers know what you have downloaded? At what level are they monitoring us, and who are they cooperating with to do so?
Odds are that he paid to receive the letter out of curiosity 'cos he had no idea what was in it. But let's say for the sake of argument that he did know it was a copyright notice....could he have let it sit in the post office and then claimed later he had never formally/legally received their notice?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Seriously, anyone can send you any letter they want. There is no requirement for it to be based on truth.
I received one of these demand letters a few months back. In it, a commercial company was demanding that I turn over domain names that I owned legally, to them because of claims of trademark infringement. Nevermind that the domains didnt point to a website that actually sold any commercial product or service of any kind to base a claim of trademark upon. The company that sent the letter was Caton Commercial
After talking with a handful of lawyers to see what my rights were, it basically boiled down to all of them telling me what I told you in the first sentence.
"All you have there is an angry letter from people who sent it to you because they themselves know that a court of law would not uphold their claims, and are hoping for you to make a decision in their benefit because you are scared."
Me personally, I just ignored the letter and plan to let the domains expire since they are worthless to me in the first place. If this company is so interested in the domains, they can buy them with their own money. I sure dont plan to give them away for free as the letter demanded.
In UK law If someone demands money from a person and threats at further hostile action it's termed "Demanding money with menace" and is a criminal offence. The Lawyer is basically saying "Pay my clients the money or we'll take you to court and take more money off of you." he has not provided any evidence other than "we got proof" which could mean anything from a bit of paper with the words "he's guilty!" scrawled on it in crayon, to a full IP tracking of every data packet too and from his machine. Best thing the guy can do is contact the Lawyer and ask for proof...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
"client is prepared to give you the opportunity to avoid legal action" provided it receives compensation of £600 plus £8.18 to cover the costs of obtaining the user's details from their ISP. "
Hear that? Sounds like a bucket full of water being thrown around?
That's the sound of his ISP shitting their pants, as they're being sued for breach of the DPA for providing personally identifiable information to a third party without prior permission or court order.
If this guy hasn't already, he needs to go talk to CAB and get legal representation.
This case could help a lot of people out in the UK beat these strong-arm extortion tactics.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Yeah, but you can go to the dealership and take the Ferrari for a test drive. If they don't have a demo available, I'm not paying unless word of mouth makes it seem worth it.
I have pirated games to try them, and if they are good, I buy them. Usually multiple copies for myself and my friends. (We have weekly lan parties, and I supply the extra systems for new people)
I'm not about to buy 4 copies of a game, and have my friends buy copies, just to discover that the multiplayer sucks horribly.
As a matter of fact, I purchased a game just a few weeks ago that played great up until we hit 3 players on the network, then the game bogged down and lagged itself to death. Fortunately, I had only purchased the one copy, and no-cd cracked it on the other systems for testing.
Software retailers don't take games back. I'm not gambling $100+ on something that I can easily test out first.
Just to clarify.... INAL
From my understand a legal document is only considered "legal" when it is signed, sealed and delivered (know this is true for contracts, think it is also applic with documents like this - inferred contract?). So since the letter didn't have enough postage, technically it wasn't delivered
So my gut feeling would be that the letter isn't legally binding. Would be fun to argue in court
Jaj
>If you read the article, the reader claims he never downloaded the game in the first place, nor can he find an evidence of it.
Your honor, the gloves clearly dont fit! Putting the defendant in charge of evidence usually produces the same results.
"Oh no your Honor I didn't steal the game, I simple facilitated an unintended demo release." Good luck with that one.
For the lawyers out there, Is there any kind of requirement to allow for a return of an untestable product if it proves unsatisfactory? Honest game reviews are only written by consumers and are often overrun by paid reviews and marketing postings in "Consumer Review" listings, so a worthless product is quite difficult to detect and as the parent post points out "software retailers don't take games back." Is there a way to demand a refund from a software company in exchange for invalidating our license?(which we don't need because the software isn't worth using)
We are all just people.
Making sure the defendant won't have time to respond is an old and oft-used trick. I would guess that's what happened here -- the letters were *deliberately* underpostaged, so that in no case would the defendant have the full two weeks to decide what to do. Whether this is still a binding letter probably varies by jurisdiction. In some areas, merely a "reasonable attempt to notify" is required, NOT an actual delivery.
A similar trick I've personally seen used for a sheriff's sale, where a member of that sheriff's department wanted to ensure that he would be the only bidder present, and that the owner would be unable to redeem his property: Legal notice of sale has to be posted in a public place. So... the legal notice was posted on a building at the fairgrounds. Which are technically "public" but in fact were locked and inaccessable for the whole notification period.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Just because you can create an opinion doesn't make it so. Property is a social contract in ANY sense of the word. You don't believe in it. So what. Doesn't matter. You belong to a society that has enacted rules and regulations that say it is property, thus it is. Again, it is a social contract. As a part of society, you can disagree with a rule, but that doesn't make it any less of a rule unless that rule is changed."
Pet peeve of mine that 'social contract" theory... see, contracts have to be voluntarily entered by all parties, and last I checked, we're all held to social contracts whether we want to or not. Even for those of us happy to "sign", the social contract is being changed unilaterally, which with normal contracts is something that is almost never permitted. Point being, I doubt Hobbes, Locke, or any of the social contract canon philosophers would actually support your assertion that current copyright law is valid within that frame.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Put the address of where you want to send the letter as the return address. Then put your own address as the recipient. Don't put postage on the letter and mail it out.
Again, don't do this as it's called mail fraud and will plop you in federal prison for an extended vacation.