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 call that horribly ineffective service. I hope the court would agree. You should never pay to know you're sued ;)
SIG: HUP
killall -9 *orrent* /mnt/storage/downloads/*
rm -rf
There, I should be safe now.
Tell Zuxxez you'll pay when they make something that's worth money. At the moment, they can starve for all I care.
Don't do it. Don't engage in the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials. No joke, no troll. It's an expensive offence to commit, due to its often exponential growth in damages, and most people can't afford it. If you can't afford the thousands it takes to settle these cases, then just stop doing it right now. Go on. If you "need" a game, have a look at some of the free (in either sense) games floating around on the internet, or buy some quality second-hand, or older, cheap, but still very good games at your local games store. It's going to be a helluva lot cheaper than paying any settlement, believe me.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Zuxxez wants 600 quid for TWO WORLDS!? They should be paying US to play that piece of shit! Not only was that game completely unplayable, it was buggy as shit as well!
They whined that it was improperly compared to Oblivion. If it wasn't for those comparisons, no one would have even cared about their piece of shit game in the first place. So since they care more about punishing the few people that download the game (or not; we don't know what these "forensics" are) a lot more than making a game that doesn't suck, they can fuck off.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
Return to Sender. Then disappear and join the Foreign Legion.
I have moderator points, but there's no option for 'wrong'.
The current exchange rate is almost US$2 per 1 british pound. At the current exchange rate, it'd be $1158.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Thanks for the postage price conversion, but what about the demand itself?
At today's exchange rates, £600 is about $1,173.15. How old are your figures?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Damn, I didn't realize the lines there were that bad.
Who modded the parent informative?
As of one minute ago, 600GBP = 1173.03USD.
As an Englishman, I also ought to point out that we seem to manage dividing by two when we see prices in dollars, so I don't see why Americans need to moan when the occasional thing is priced in Sterling.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Everything I've read about both Davenport Lyons and Zuxxez makes them look pretty shady since they are using MAFIAA tactics to extort money from people, many of whom are innocent but their guilty until proven innocent outlook doesn't help. They went after 500 people last year for that stupid pinball game, and even went so far as to ask people for details/documentation about their computers and routers, all outside of court mind you, so it's another story of IP renegades run amuck.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I accidentally converted to Euro. Thanks for correcting my mistake.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
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 ask them for their forensic evidence it was you that downloaded the game. I would also request your ISP for the information that they provided to the company against the Data Protection Act and politely inform them that if they did provide this information then they would be next in line for divulging your personal details. I would request from the lawyers copies of all the details provided by your ISP. I would also be informing them that their collection and use of your personal details without your approval will be met by even more stringent regulations under British law. I would also contact the Citizen's Advice Bureau to discuss with them how you should proceed and for them to put you in touch with a lawyer/association. At the brunt of this, you have to pay for your ISP to have provided the information. This means that your ISP charged for providing them the information, ergo they sold the information to a third-party. I would have their necks if my ISP did this. Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
And Americans tend to swap the currency signs when pricing things for sale over here ...
The letter goes on to claim that its "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.
8.18 for the ISP for my personal information? I'd be insulted.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
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
"Because anybody who thinks that something intangible is "property" has shit for brains."
Bull fucking shit.
I believe that trees are common property of everyone. It is good for the world and I don't care who's land it belongs on...thus anything made of wood should be up for the taking. Anyone that thinks something tangible should be property has shit for brains. I don't care how you frame it, the only thing that belongs to any of us are our thoughts. As such, the only real property is intellectual property.
You see how this works?
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.
So the point is, grow the fuck up. You want YOUR intellectual property given away for free, GPL it. Or CC it. Or otherwise. Maybe if enough others feel the same, you can turn the tide, but that doesn't make the fact that you own your ideas any less significant.
There has to be a reason I don't come to Slashdot any more. It is pretty bad when Digg and Reddit has more mature comments these days...
What, aside from the lol forgot stamps bit, is the point of this story. Guy infringes copyright, gets sued. So? Are we supposed to be conditioned to find every case of copyright enforcement to be outrageous?
For great justice.
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/
This is Slashdot. News for nerds. Don't multiply by two - just bitshift left by one.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Couldn't resist the bad pun, sorry.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
In either case, the developpers don't make any more money. Now, if you were to give me your game instead of selling it to me, what would be the difference? You could always tell me that you would not have a copy yourself, which is fine, but you still played the game. In that case, what would be the difference in giving one game to one person after another after they finish it and giving digital copies to everyone at the same time? After they are done, the copies will eventually be erased anyway and the final result is the same: We all played and didn't pay.
I'm not making an argument to support filesharing, I'm just saying your suggestion wasn't completely thought through.
Also, it's not because you don't pay for a game that you would have necesserely bought the game in the first place. There are a couple of zelda games that I'd like to try but unless I find free copies or extremely cheap secondhand copies, there is no way I'm paying for that. Especially since I'd need to buy a gamecube and a wii. The result? I never played them and I don't care that much.
True, based on current exchange rates, £600 = US$1,168. No wait, $1,173...uh, $1,195. Whoops - now $1,225.
But for a Londonder, £600 today is basically the same as £600 two months ago, or from now. £600 hasn't 'gone up' for THEM, only for people wanting to use US$ to pay that £600.
This illustrates Purchasing Power Parity, a concept that is similar to foreign currency exchange, but that looks at the long-term relative purchasing power of a currency.
Not "how many Pounds Sterling can I buy with 1 UD$", but "how many units of ProductX can I buy with 1% of local per capita annual GDP." Theory says that goods should have identical relative prices in every market, or else there are arbitrage opportunities that people will take advantage of until the prices in all markets are the same (after accounting for transport, etc.)
What happens, however, is that identical goods are NOT priced at the same relative level after currency conversion, because a lot of short-term change in the ForEx markets is due to market movements, not underlying fundamental changes in purchasing power.
The Economist magazine publishes the 'Big Mac Index', which humorously uses the Big Mac as the good to compare relative purchasing power around the world.
So a Big Mac costs 4GBP in London, and based on the exchange rate, it looks like it costs US$8.00. But it really doesn't, because Londoners aren't paying US$, but with GBP, and the Big Mac costs the same to them that it did a year ago, even though a year ago exchange rates would have said the Big Mac costs $6.50.
Did the price of a Big Mac go up? The price of a Big Mac in the U.K. didn't go up for a Londoner, but did for a U.S. visitor. The price of a Big Mac in the U.S. didn't go up for a Floridian, but fell for a U.K. visitor. But in each case, the cost in the local currency was and is 1/10,000th of per capita income. That is purchasing power parity, and shows that shows changes in exchange rates are not the same thing as changes in relative purchasing power. On a PPP basis, U.S-U.K. currencies haven't moved against each other even close to the amount suggested by market currency exchange rates.
In Scots law at least (and I think it's the same in England and Wales/NI - IANAL though), threatening to sue someone doesn't amount to extortion. Given that the article suggests the evidence is pretty dubious though, I'd guess that any civil court in the UK would throw the case out, even if it got that far. Even though you can send a letter saying "I'll sue you!" to whoever you want, I think most judges/sheriffs/magistrates would expect the pursuer/plaintiff to have made reasonable efforts to resolve the issue before claiming, and that their claim has some merit.
Of course we don't know the full facts in this instance but it sounds like there pretty much isn't any evidence, and if there is, that it was obtained in a dodgy way. I'd type more if I hadn't just cycled back from work (I'm about as fit as your average Slashdotter)...ask for proof as mentioned...ISP...Data Protection Act.. etc etc.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
From: - http://virtuallawatlse.blogspot.com/2007/03/davenport-lyons-pursues-500-file.html
and
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/28/uk_share_hunt/
The interesting bit is "In relation to your claim that your computer was hacked into, we regret that the security of your computer is not our concern. It is your responsibility to ensure that your computer is protected at all times."
WTF!! Does that mean if someone is stabbed on the street then it's the victims fault that (s)he wasn't wearing a stab-proof vest? Or do we sue car manufactorers for making cars that can go faster than the national speed limits (aiding and abeting a crime)? Or if someone steals your credit cards and uses them then it's your fault for not keeping them secure?!!??
Where do you draw the line?
Jaj
No, your argument is bullshit.
On the contrary, property is the natural consequence of the physical fact that two people can't use the same tangible artifact at the same time. This is exactly the opposite of so-called "intellectual property," which not only naturally duplicates itself and is almost impossible to prevent from duplicating itself, but also only becomes valuable as a consequence of the duplication itself! (For example, would Shakespeare's plays have had any value whatsoever if he had never communicated them to anybody else? No!)
In other words, real property is based on, and compatible with, physical reality. "Intellectual property" is based on lawyers' imaginations and is incompatible with physical reality.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"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.
U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 1, Clause 8:
Note the bold part. That's the thing that Congress is given authorization to do: "promote progress." Not to compensate creators for their effort due to some kind of moral obligation, and certainly not to obstruct progress by preventing people from building on previous works! Now, see the word "by?" That means that the remainder of the clause is nothing more than an example of the way in which the writers of the Constitution imagined accomplishing the previously stated goal. It doesn't mean that Congress must do it, especially the way it's implemented nowadays such that it acts contrary to its purpose; it just means that Congress may do it.
The idea of copyright as an entitlement to artists was imported via the Berne Convention, which should never have been ratified because it is, as I just explained, unconstitutional.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ahh, a textualist and originalist--you must be a huge fan of Justices Thomas and Scalia and despise Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, etc?
However, I don't think your analysis is correct. The copyright clause is, as you cite, part of section 8. Section 8 enumerates the powers of congress. The text you managed to find (the copyright clause) clearly allows congress to "Secure for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." There is very little to interpret in that part of the clause, it's clear.
On the other hand "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" is up for much greater interpretation. How exactly does one promote the progress? You and I might have very different ideas about how to do this. Congress might have other ideas. Congress has the clearly enumerated mandate to do so, and the way to do so.
So what exactly is unconstitutional?
Umm, standing up for the law is one thing, but you seem quite convinced the guy did what they claim, when none of the so-called "evidence" has been provided to the public. This is why we argue about such things, because if we didn't, people like you would have most of the planet in jail based on the possibility they may have done something without any proof.
Hacking? Are you serious? Just connect to the tracker, you can see who is downloading it. After all, if you couldn't tell the IP addresses of the people in the swarm, you couldn't upload/download to/from them. That's step 1. Step 2 was apparently pay his ISP about 8 pounds, and they turned over his name and address. Step 3 is demand 600 pounds plus the 8 pounds you spend buying his legally protected private customer information. Step 4 = PROFIT!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
Mind you, Two Worlds is a badly written, badly acted, badly balanced, boring wreck of a game in the first place.
I'm guessing it did so badly that this is a last-ditch effort by someone to actually make some money from it.
Why do you limit yourself to one valid basis for the social contract of property rights?
The problem with your logic is that it presumes that for intellectual property to exist, it MUST mirror real property; and that because the foundation of the concept does not mirror, it invalidates the concept of IP.
There is no logical reason (though there are philosophical ones) why we can't have an IP social contract in addition to a RP social contract; furthermore, we can say that due to the fundamental differences between RP & IP, the social contracts should be different (and guess what, they are!). The concepts can be parallel without being equal, and this removes the constaint of needing equivalent bases.
Also, property is not defined by the fact that only one person can utilize it at the same time. Otherwise there would be no concept of ownership in absentia. If you own land in Montana, but reside in New York... do I have every right to use your land in Montana, since I am not depriving you of the use of that land?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai