Game Makers Accusing Innocent People of Piracy In the UK

eldavojohn writes "It's a topic that a lot of game makers like Atari don't want the public hearing: game makers wrongfully accusing clearly innocent people of piracy. From the article, 'According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers. He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to hundreds of others, he told the BBC.' If only a few are coming forward after receiving extortion letters ('Pay £500 OR ELSE!'), what's the actual number of those out there being wrongfully accused?"

Comments

Lawyers smelt money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lawyers figured out this is a way to print money. Why am I not surprised?

Its cheaper to pay them off than hire a lawyer and defend yourself. Many have no other choice.

Send out letters, receive money. Such a deal. Par for the course for for lawyers.

Re:Lawyers smelt money.

[Alain Williams]

I work for a law firm and I assure you this stuff is small fry for lawyers

Yes a one off would be small fry, but by the hundred or thousand it is good easy money. Get a senior partner to write a sufficiently blood curdling letter and then a junior legal secretary cut and pastes in the case by case name, address, etc. If there is any correspondence this is paid for by either the ''infringing'' punter or by the game maker.

Whichever way you look at it the legal parasites make money.

Re:Lawyers smelt money.

[AmiMoJo]

The parent is correct, just do the maths:

Demand £500 per letter.
1 letter costs 50p to print, put in envelope and post.

Thus, if more than 1 in 1000 people pays up, profit.

I'm surprised con artists are not already doing this from home, instead of the usual "you may already have won" rubbish.

The basic problem is that there is almost no cost involved in accusing someone of a civil offence and demanding payment on threat of legal action. If such letters carried a legal requirement to pay the recipient £50 if legal action was not followed up, it would put a swift end to the practice.

Re:Lawyers smelt money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because paying $500 is much, much cheaper than getting a lawyer and going to court?

The problem is that defending yourself costs money, wether you are innocent or guilty. This is a flaw of the legal system.

Re:Lawyers smelt money.

[blackest_k]

while you have deep pockets and probably more than half a clue as to how to produce a meaningful defense, your in a minority.

The costs of defending yourself against the charges made, engaging a solicitor, an expert witness, forensic examination of your computer systems, (which could only demonstrates the systems presented were not used, if you accept you can prove a negative). Loss of your PC hardware while defending the case, the loss of private data, unrelated to the case but stored on the pc systems, all in all can out weigh the annoyance of paying the relatively small sum of £500.

So your looking at lose, lose and the more you try to fight the more the costs get added on. For a lot of people cutting their losses by paying is the cheapest solution.

What is more interesting is there seems to be cases where IP addresses were identified that hadn't been used for p2p, ie not including unknown access by third parties.

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-pirates-with-fake-peers-081020/comment-page-2/

If you take this report at face value as the bbc seems to have done, it seems pirate bay inserts random ip addresses into the peers list. It also appears some investigators are assuming that there is an offer to download being made by an ip address by virtue of being on that list and haven't bothered to confirm that the file is actually available from that peer.

As some p2p users block certain ip ranges there is no way to be certain that the user is blocking the investigators ip address or isn't offering the file in the first place.

Would representatives of the pirate bay make credible witnesses in your defense?
Would they even come to your country to take the witness stand?

  while this is a uk story and may not be as risky as entering US territory (see cases of off shore gambling company executives being held in the USA despite being legal in the UK and company shares traded on the London stock exchange).

The cost of bringing forth these witnesses would be probably a greater expense than just paying the extortion money.

Should the matter go to court, and the defendants lose there are additional costs incurred, being unable or unwilling to immediately pay usually results in bailiffs fee's becoming payable and these can rapidly spiral way beyond the value of the initial judgement.

I think if you were to bring one of these letters to an honest solicitor or lawyer they would say pay it and get on with your life. It isn't fair or just but it probably would be the cheapest solution.

Hopefully some of these cases where people fight back and win will at least ensure in future that at least some evidence is gathered beyond an IP address.

While I commend your willingness to fight an injustice, you do have something to lose presumably and a lawyer should advice you, you could lose it.

You may never of heard the phrase commonly used by petty criminals "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime". Currently the chances of facing real penalty's for downloading copyrighted pay for data is quite low but the risks do appear to be increasing.

Why bother taking the risk? perhaps it's even worth going for a cheaper net access package and buying wisely.
  It's not hard to get clued up on what is worth your money and what isn't these days and often there are good free alternatives.

Re:The UK

[Kokuyo]

I am truly no fan of the US' politics and haven't been for, err, about eight years, but in my opinion, the UK has let the US cough on their dust, they're so far ahead in this.

Seriously, they just need a curfew and they'll be 95% done with getting to what we've seen in V for Vendetta. At this very moment, I'm actually less inhibited against traveling to the US than I am against traveling to the UK.

Re:The UK

[Goldberg's Pants]

Crazy isn't it. It's like they've looked at the RIAA, seen the public attitude toward them and said "Yes! We want a slice of that animosity and hatred!"

Stuff like this is why I've largely stopped buying anything from mainstream publishers. I refuse to enable their greed and avarice anymore.

Support the independent game developers!

Re:Nothing new

[JasterBobaMereel]

"...more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers..."

Copyright infringement is not theft, is not "piracy", and file-sharing is not automatically copyright infringement

Were they pirates - no
Were they stealing - no
were they infringing copyright - no
were they sharing files - no
were they using P2P technology (yes it is built into the game)

Re:The UK

[LaskoVortex]

Why should all minors suffer just because some are idiots? If some are doing something illegal, you can give them a selective curfew, if not, then they should be allowed to go out whenever they wish.

You know you are getting old when your instinct is to argue with that. And then I remember how much fun I had as a highschooler after midnight and then I side with the kids--and then I *really* think about how much fun I had as a kid after midnight and then I realize that there is no way they need to be out that late.

Re:The UK

[Kokuyo]

But curfew is to put the cart before the donkey. If your problem is that kids are out doing crazy stuff because their parents are not able to handle the kids the way they need to, then you need to either give them the means to change that situation (e.g. chance the economy in such a way that they have both the time and resources to parent their kids) or make sure they just don't have kids.

I don't understand when this belief manifested that anyone was entitled to ruining a child's life.

Re:The UK

[Kokuyo]

There is also no way that I need to decide which doctor I want to see... beside me liking having a choice.

There is also no way that I need to decide what clothes I want to wear. Someone else could do it for me and I still wouldn't suffer cold or make a fool of myself by walking around in the nude.

The fact that someone LIKES to do something should be enough of a point not have a discussion about who needs to do what. As long as a person, no matter the age, does not influence someone else's life overly negatively, they should be allowed to do whatever they please.

Since we are talking about kids that don't have the same kind of responsibility and rights as adults do, their guardians should be the ones to set the rules. Not the state.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

You certainly aren't a lawyer. "Only the CPS can prosecute anyone"? WTF? That's the most retarded statement I've ever heard in my life. The CPS prosecutes on behalf of the state. Anyone else can privately prosecute. You can also be sued. Back to IANAL 101 for you.

-10 points for accusing the BBC of "misinformation" when you're talking total shit yourself and the BBC are accurate. And -5 for everyone who modded you up.

Re:The UK

[ultranova]

As disgusting as I find that (and saying that as someone who is regularly disturbed at night be drunk teenagers), it still doesn't equal a nationwide curfew for everyone.

First, it's for teenagers. Then it's for sex offenders. Then it's for convicted felons. Then you need to carry your identification papers with you at night to prove you're not one of them. Then being seen far from your house at night is grounds for arrest due to reasonable suspicion that you're up to no good. Then far means anywhere outside your front door.

Sometimes, the slope really is slippery.

Re:I'm getting damn sick of this

[Psychotria]

The real question si not to know if you're right, it is to decide if you are ready to spend 10 years of your short life and risk your marriage and home for that.

Yes, there is that risk. On the other hand if I try to live under a rock and not stand up for what I believe in, then it'd be a pretty boring life IMO. So, yes, I would risk it because the alternative (depending on your view) is being a prisoner anyway. Life is short, I agree. If you choose to live the "safe" life and you're happy, then great. I choose to defend my beliefs. The "cost" will definately involve losing something. The point is that whatever path you take you will lose something... it's a matter of what you value and what you're willing to lose. Your "loss"/"risk" probably differs from mine (which is OK). The opposite is what you will gain. These have to be balanced based on your personal beliefs.

You raise a valid argument. Would I be willing to lose my home? Probably not. Would I be willing to risk my home? Yes. As you mentioned, life is short. My assertion is that because life is so short I will stand up for what I believe; because at the end of the day when I am in a nursing home, I can sit back and say that I stood up for what I believe. That is what will make *me* happy. When I die I will do so knowing that I did the best I could and stood by my beliefs. I will not make myself my own prisoner. Your mileage will probably vary.

As I get older...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You know you are getting old when your instinct is to argue with that.

Actually, the older I get, the more strongly I believe in opposing measures like that [the curfew].

Whether or not any one person enjoys or otherwise benefits from something is not the point, and must never be allowed to become the point. The important thing is that everyone should be free, by default, to do absolutely anything they like. Restrictions should only ever be imposed by law on behaviour that is actually harmful in some way, and any restrictions that are imposed should only ever be proportionate to the harm that would be done.

This is probably the important principle of any fair justice system, because without it, governments are free to set arbitrary laws for their own political (or worse) purposes. This leads to blanket laws, such as (to pick some common, controversial examples): speed limits and banning mobile phones while driving, instead of prosecuting dangerous or inconsiderate driving; trying to ban whole electronic communications networks, rather than either going after people who abuse those networks to infringe copyright or mandating restrictions on the networks that are reasonable and consistent with prohibiting just the illegal behaviour; or, as in this case, restricting the freedoms of a whole group of people on account of the unacceptable behaviour of a small minority (which is effectively guilt by association).

In each of those cases, the law probably does do some good, in the sense that it does inhibit harmful behaviour by some people. The problem is the collateral damage: the law also catches people whose behaviour would not have been harmful and punishes them anyway, which is unjust. Of course, it's easier to impose blanket laws, both for enforcement (increasingly mechanically; whatever happened to "man shall not be judged by machine"?) and for scoring political points ("Speed kills! Look, we imposed a new low limit to make the road safer outside your home, so now your kids don't have to stop, look and listen before they cross").