Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of Germans Threatened With €250 Fines For Streaming Porn
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Thousands of German users that have used a porn website to stream shows have received threatening letters from a local law firm demanding €250 ($344) per certain watched clips, Chip.de reports. Apparently, a Swiss-based firm that owns the content hosted by porn site Redtube has tasked a law firm with collecting fines for each of its shows that was streamed online in the region. The law firm has apparently received a go ahead from a local court, and as many as ten thousand warnings may have been set to users, for porn shows watched in August."
I'd better cross Germany off the list countries to live in.
It should tell you something when a business decides that 10,000 of its consumers are criminals. Your business model is broken, you can sue all you like but it still wont fix what's really broken.
Shouldn't the company be going after the porn site that streamed it? Anyone know why a German court would OK this?
The status of German copyright laws is ridiculous. Any law firm can send out threatening letters, literally saying "pay us X Euros or we will take you to court". It's like the Mob.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I'm lost here, isn't the company behind this 'Redtube' website legally responsible for copyright infringement, and all resultant penalties, instead of the individual viewers?
... apparently the fines relate to the porn not being dirty enough.
Three links of possible interest, concerning "The Archive AG" - mostly in German:
Company information
Article in the Handelszeitung
Web site
The address appears (on Google maps) to be more than just a mailbox. The two people running it are Germans - it's not clear why their company is in Switzerland. Downloading in Switzerland is legal, by the way, justified by the fact that we all pay these surcharges on empty media.
For anyone who has been threatened by The Archive AG, the article in the Handelszeitung includes a reference to an IT attorney who is apparently advising many people in this case.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Sauerkrauts.
Maybe their reasoning is something along the lines of it being too difficult to prosecute/litigate the creators/originators, so instead go after the consumers! You know, like with child porn?
When I first saw the article title I thought it read "Steaming Porn" instead. My mind went wandering where I didn't need it to go...
Looking at the reactions, people are either naive or not serious. This has nothing to do with who is legally responsible for viewing the content. This is a clear trolling/blackmail attempt. The law firm expects people to be so embarrassed that they rather pay that defend themselves legally. Of course a real law suit doesn't have a chance but the threat of exposing the names of the German house fathers may be enough to let them cough up the money.
will get those letters. The law firm should make an 'honest' mistake and address it to Ms .
http://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_Peppermint
Back in 2006 a similar case, but with music rather than porn, happend in Italy. At the end the the IP addr mining attivity has been recognized as illegal and the company was condamned.
According to a report on heise and some discussions by people who received those:Their browsers were made to connect to certain reddube.com (not rettube, mind you) urls by a skimmed traffic site. So Site A wants to earn some money from their site and Service X says: "Add a link to this image from us to your website, you don,t even have to place it somewhere visible!". Site A does so and whenever a user visits the site, the browser sends a request to servers from Service X which redirect then to Site B, which might need some traffic and wants to get it in shady ways. So the users didn't have to visit redtube at all and some guy even looked into his looks and went: "I visited redtube, but not that video. I was redirected to that after visiting another site!", which shows that its not the "uh, i don't watch porn, no, no..."-reflex speaking.
Also, there are several lawsuits against this swiss based guys on the way. What they're doing is fraud. Fraud's not legal, you know? Not even in germany, and not even when porn is involved...
Seems it is a lawyer outfit or company trying to squeeze money from people by trying to embarrass them by maybe disclosing their name, address etc.
There was one case apparently where a person got a court order to stop it for her.
There are a lot of open questions - court seemed to mix up downloads with streaming and how the IP/name info etc. got created is another good question.
What also seems to happen is that other crooks are sending fake cease and desist emails (or something like that) to catch a ride on this..
And the Swiss people who are from the same country as the assholes who did this are responsible for this too, so you definitely can't choose Switzerland.
Now where was I?
Ah, yes, the DMCA like laws are lobbied by the USA content industries and therefore you clearly can't choose America.
It seems that the law firm got the IP addresses by running ads on RedTube
There's an ongoing investigation and criminal complaint against the responsible lawyer Daniel Sebastian.
I know two things: First, the judge who made the decision has been conned by the weasel wording of the lawsuit. The lawyers must have known what they're doing. If you so consistently avoid mentioning that it's a streaming site and try to convince a court that it's a page similar to TPB, you won't be able to feign ignorance. You tried to cheat the court.
Judges generally don't really like being had. They really hate it when they notice you try to trick them into ruling their way. I know that one too.
Maybe it could help to send him an eye opener or two? He might want to have a word or two with the lawyers involved. Mostly because judges also don't like being the laughing stock of a whole trade, because they ruled over it and seeming like they have no idea what they ruled over.
Even if it won't change this verdict, a certain judge might be less inclined to side with the shysters in the future...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
we had here similar blackmail attempts. company has created a website where they offered VLC (yes the player) for download. The people who filled their personal info (there was a bait - free lottery to win an iphone and ipad) got an invoice of 100 EUR, because in the conditions it said that the subscriber of the website is liable to pay one time fee of 100 EUR.
The true analogy would be: Would you, as a judge, allow listeners to a pirate radio station (not certain if the listeners know it's a pirate station or not) to get sued by the record companies for loyalties. The site that was streaming the content most likely was aware of the fact that they were streaming content they did not have rights for.and that's malicious intent.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It appears that T-Online linked an IP in a subpoena to you. But 1) Was that the actual IP address at that time that was used to share that film? 2) Was that IP address actually assigned to your system? Mistakes are easy, I'm assuming you already asked for a full list of all IP addresses assigned to your connection for a full year before and after this incident took place with *all* log file entries they have on you? Any inconsistency or missing/improbable timestamp in that will help you proof that they don't have a perfect administration. Also ask for full log files from the company providing logs, not just your own data, plus a list of all software used on the systems they detected it with. Get the full setup and configuration details for their time/NTP config. If they won't provide those, claim you are not given the data you need to prove your innocence and they simply don't have adequate log files or are serious about getting the time stamps right in their log files.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
This has happened before. Copyright infringement trolling is a very lucrative business in Germany. There have been cases of lawyers sending out thousands of letters demanding payments of over a thousand euros, of which about 75% consisted in legal fees. At the end virtually noboby was taken to court for this, but if only 10% of the recipients pays up (I'm guessing the number was higher though) it already means a very high ROI for simply doing a mass-mailing.
It's also very lucrative for VPN providers, as their market in Germany is constantly increasing.
How did they get the IP addresses of people using a streaming website that they don't operate (and I doubt the records where handed over by this non-German website)?
... and if the judge is stupid enough to grant their cheats ...
Who should the Germans sue ?
Their government for appointing a stupid judge ?
The lawyers who cheated (I do see this as the responsibility of the government) ?
Of that stupid motherfucker that happens to be a judge ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The law firm scammed the court into ordering the ISP to identify IP addresses by claiming Redtube is a peer-to-peer filesharing network, and "obviously illegal" in a manner that participants would be aware of.
Since neither of these are true, it sounds like someone is due to get their license revoked for gross malpractice, and may be subject to criminal charges for lying to a court.
"If your website doesn't remove all of my clients copyrighted material immediately, I won't sue you, I will sue all your clients." When the "I agree to view porn" box (ahem, I've been told one has to click to enter those sites) may soon become a EULA.
Gently reply
holy crap. the internet only works because you can make copies. computers only work because
you can make copies.
people should just accept that if they put it on the internet that it's per-de-facto in a PUBLIC DOMAIN.
Rain is wet. why is this hard to understand?
nobody is stopping you from trying to "hide", encrypt or in any other way obfuscate your
data, but don't come cry if someone figures out a way around it. got that?!
if you don't want it in the public domain DON'T put it on the internet!
How are they doing this? I thought the ISPs adopted the zero logs model to keep pace with their privacy laws.
You've got your "kinky" porn and your "midget" porn and "hardcore" porn and "soft" porn.
Now we have "Streaming" porn. Giggity!
Violating lottery laws and prostitution laws at the same time? As Mayor Kravindish might say, "This is illegal, you know."
This is why, on my recent trip to Germany, I was unable to find WiFi ANYWHERE. Not even coffee shops had WiFi for customers because the shop would be fined for anything a customer did on their network. Hotels gave out individual logins for each customer so that usage could be tied to a person. Prosecution like this is bad for everyone because it severely limits access to the internet. Without access the very companies that are prosecuting will also lose more money than they ever gained through their supposed fight against piracy.
Maybe Mr. Hates "pretentious douches" thinks everyone uses Mac Pros.