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.'"
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?
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.
"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.