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."

Comments

Oh Dear.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd better cross Germany off the list countries to live in.

Re:Oh Dear.

[Penguinisto]

Can't blame you, considering that the folks doing the harassing are Swiss (and thus not even based in an EU member nation, so even that can't be used as an excuse).

Out of morbid curiosity - who uploaded the content, and why isn't the law firm chasing that guy? Oh, nevermind... bigger (and TBH, more reliable) revenue stream from chasing the poor horny bastards who sucked down the content instead.

Lesson for the folks in Germany... proxies are your friend.

Re:Oh Dear.

[meerling]

I remember seeing an article a while ago talking about distribution of media and technologies. Porn and Redtube specifically were mentioned. Apparently sites like Redtube are used by the media copyright owners to upload clips of their products for publicity. It's kind of like a movies trailers site for porn. So I have to wonder if this troll even has the proper authority to make such claims of redress, and if the clips they're targeting (if specified) were uploaded by the owners or not.

I don't know if Redtube really is a clip site, or it it's something more. I pretty much assume that porn sites are loaded with malware, but who knows.

By the way, as I've seen it mentioned that the troll lied to the judge and told them it was a p2p site, I wouldn't put any underhanded or illegal thing outside the realm of what they'd do.

Re:Oh Dear.

[crabel]

Not so fast. First of all, the lawyers "cheated". They avoided the term "streaming" in their applications to court and made it look like a typical filesharing case. The courts granted most of their applications because of "unbefugtem öffentlichen Zugänglichmachen über eine sogenannte Tauschbörse" that means "unauthorized sharing of files through a file sharing network". German internet law blogger Thomas Stadler explains in his blog, why their applications are invalid (for various reasons). German link: http://www.internet-law.de/2013/12/warum-die-streaming-abmahnungen-der-rechtsanwaelte-uc-unwirksam-sind.html

Re:Oh Dear.

[somersault]

Out of morbid curiosity - who uploaded the content, and why isn't the law firm chasing that guy?

There's a possibility that the porn company uploaded it themselves, just so that they could execute this plan.

Th **AA have been caught doing similar things, so it's not unprecedented.

Of course it's very possible that a normal user uploaded them too.

Re:Oh Dear.

[gl4ss]

"I feel no pity for the people who stream porn though, just what exactly did you think would happen if you weren't buying the videos?"

nothing? the people doing the infringing were the uploaders and the site.

how many people have been prosecuted for watching tv content on youtube? nobody.

but where did they get the list of viewers? from redtube? hacked someone? ???

Re:Oh Dear.

[contrapunctus]

I'd cross Germany off because of the whole church collecting income tax thing

Re:Oh Dear.

[gbjbaanb]

I read elsewhere that some users were sent shortened links that took them to the redtube video, so they didn't even know it was going to be porn until they got there.

It does smack of a scam - a bit like me claiming these words are copyright and if you read them, you owe me loadsamoney. Which you now do, of course. Please send a cheque.

Re:Oh Dear.

[ebno-10db]

In all fairness they've cleaned up their act pretty well. Still, it's ironic that Americans have reason to envy how fair and reasonable the German justice system is.

Maybe next time we should go to war with ourselves. Oops, tried that about 150 years ago and ... eliminated slavery! That settles it - going to war with ourselves is definitely a way to improve justice in this country.

Re:Oh Dear.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I feel no pity for the people who stream porn though, just what exactly did you think would happen if you weren't buying the videos?"

nothing?

how many people have been prosecuted for watching tv content on youtube? nobody.

I agree with you. The poster you are responding to falls into the trap: "I don't like it, so I'm OK with them being hit with a stick". As you mention, change the title from a porn show to Family Guy episode (which are all over YouTube) and a million Americans searching for "Brian dies" on YouTube. Every one of those millions of people owe Fox $300, right? How would the poster feel now? How does he know any video on YouTube isn't copyrighted by someone who can hire a lawyer? Music video, TV show clips, a little indy show from another website?

The previous poster needs to work on their ability to abstract a concept from their own biases.

Re:Oh Dear.

[compro01]

If you don't want to pay the tithe, just ditch the religion.

Re:Oh Dear.

[TangoMargarine]

repeated

How many times do I have to keep telling people, Germany didn't start Word War 1?! Serbian nationalist assassinates Austrian dude, Austria invades Serbia, Russia starts mobilizing to defend Serbia, and ONLY THEN did Germany get involved.

Bahahahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bahahahahaha

[Dr Max]

It should tell you something when mearly going to a website and viewing something can make you a criminal. It's not like torrenting where you can argue that by downloading, you're also uploading to others; they just went to a site and pressed play. If a music station forgot to pay for a songs royalty, would the record label be able to sue anyone listening to that station at the time? What if a billboard had an unauthorised copyrighted image on it, is every motorist going past it going to get a letter and a fine?

Re:Bahahahahaha

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

That *is* their business model.
I read up on this yesterday (German Language) and the situation is more complicated than it seems.
The providers affected are all over Germany, so various local courts were involved. The one in Köln really screwed things up: what the people are supposed to have done is Downloaded the file(s), what they were accused of was Sharing them and Köln went along with this. The difference is that the provider does not have to give out addresses on Downloads but they do if Sharing is involved. The actual "Abmahnung" letters which went out said nothing about Sharing at all. The Law Firm based their claim on the Downloads being in Cache so they were available for others. To make things worse, the largest provider in Germany (T-Online) is based in Köln. Other courts rejected that argument, others asked questions and the Lawyers withdrew their request.

I have a related problem at the moment - a couple of years ago someone accused me of sharing some other porno film, again T-Online was involved. My wlan is wpa2 with a 63-byte random, generated mixed upper/lower string and it accepts only one Mac address, I have checked both PCs which were on at the time for Trojans / Virii with a bootable scanner and there was nothing. Under German law there is no redress - if they claim it then I must have done it. I'm fighting this one out at the moment.

For me this is a reason not to use T-Online. My main account is now somewhere else but I *need* Internet for when I work at home and two independent providers (Cable and DSL) made sense back when the Cable provider was unreliable. I think I'm going to have to dump T-Online which means dumping Telekom for my phone.

Re:Bahahahahaha

[Opportunist]

So they can also tell the difference between butter and I can't believe it ain't butter?

I doubt the German court even understood what it ruled over, to be honest. I know their technical experience quite well, and I wouldn't trust the average judge to know more than how to press play to watch some porn. But he probably needs a bailiff for that too, he usually does when he needs to watch some kind of evidence on a computer...

Re:Bahahahahaha

[MrL0G1C]

Are you aware that some trackers give out fake IP addresses to foil those who try to attack the working of the torrent. If all the company has against you is a time and an IP address then they don't have enough - insufficient evidence. The company has to prove that two-way communications happened between your computer and another sharing the files, not the 1-way communication which is ip-address only aka fake.

Was it advertised as free?

[asmkm22]

Shouldn't the company be going after the porn site that streamed it? Anyone know why a German court would OK this?

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[mwvdlee]

It's much harder to shame a pornsite into paying €2.500.000 damages than it is to shame 10.000 people into paying €250.
I don't know about Germany, but it some european countries, just downloading something isn't illegal.
But a court case doesn't have to have merit if the damage they can do (publically shaming somebody by exposing their sexual tastes) and lawyer fees required to defend are much greater than the $250 blackmail money asked for.

Personally, I'm wondering how this law firm got the contact addresses.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[Anonymous Coward]

This techdirt article from a couple of years ago suggests a precedent was set then that viewing a streaming file is considered to be making a copy of it, and therefore the viewers are also liable for copyright infringement. Stupid, but this is sometimes what happens when old laws are applied to scenarios they weren't intended for and the court doesn't have enough room to manoeuvre out of it. I don't read German well enough to look at the decision and see whether it suggests that the court tried to find a way around a badly phrased law, or if they were just being vindictive, but it seems likely enough that they tried and failed.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[the_other_chewey]

I don't know about Germany, but it some european countries, just downloading something isn't illegal.

It isn't illegal in Germany as well. Pretty much all lawyers except the ones sending the letters
think those letters to be a hilarious. They all advise to ignore the letters and wait to be taken to
court (which almost certainly will never happen).
Sadly, it will probably scare enough people into paying to nonetheless be profitable.

Personally, I'm wondering how this law firm got the contact addresses.

Well-informed speculation is that they used ad tracking on redtube to get IP addresses (external
ad servers see the request IP and the referer string...).

Then they tricked the courts into assuming distribution on behalf of said IP to get a court order for
the client's identity. I'm not exaggerating: The court filings very carefully avoid the word "streaming"
and imply downloading and P2P distribution without actually saying so.

Only about two thirds of the courts actually fell for it, but each one was good for thousands of identities.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[righteousness]

Unlike the US and the UK, Germany has a civil law system in contrast to the common law system used in certain countries like the US and the UK. Therefore judges in Germany are not bounded by decision made in former rulings that are not clearly codified in written legislation.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[AHuxley]

Yes thats the fun part, how where the ip's in one jurisdiction found?

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[Penguinisto]

Personally, I'm wondering how this law firm got the contact addresses.

Odds are perfect they chased IP addys, combined them with date+time stamps, then got the ISPs to help them out in that regard; it's pretty much the only way they could get much of anything like that. Now whether the ISPs helped out due to some German equivalent of the DMCA (or suchlike) or were paid to? Dunno...

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[Sique]

It was helped by a gross misrepresentation of facts before the court: Suggesting distribution while never explicitely saying so. For about 1/4 of the letters requesting the court to allow for identification of the persons behind the list of IP addresses, the requests were denied due to missing evidence. 3/4 nevertheless were agreed on, and there is much speculation going on if the court has messed up downloading and distribution, helped by a very wishi-washi formulated letter of request.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[fazig]

According to more recent reports (German) the Court was fooled by this alleged law firm. They've presented the incident to the court as peer to peer file-sharing of copyright protected data, the Court ruled accordingly.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[Kickasso]

Use an ad blocker, kids.

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[AmiMoJo]

Isn't deliberately misleading the court itself an offense?

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[garry_g]

That's another point of criticism - while P2P or download is a deliberate action, leading to local storage of files, streaming videos from a free site that is not by definition a pirate site makes it near impossible for users to know they are breaking copyright laws ...
Which is why the letters to the court left out the word "streaming" - for streaming, no court order would have been issued (most likely, anyway). Which, in turn, should get the lawyer knowingly misleading the court disbarred or at least fined ...

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[Opportunist]

Because of two things: The average German judge doesn't know jack about technology and the law company abused that ignorance.

They said "download" in their lawsuit and the judge went "Oh, it's that where the higher courts decided for the plaintiff, like that Pirate Bay thing, so I guess I should, too".

Re:Was it advertised as free?

[chilvence]

Fuck off, they can find some other way to make money. Or die. Still better than ads.

Oh Germany

[buchner.johannes]

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.

Re:Oh Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

And the difference between that and anyone else's law is what precisely?

Let me help you there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung

The difference has to do with standing, i.e. who can actually bring a lawsuit. This is a misfeature specific to German law, rooted in a culture of conformity and Obrigkeitshörigkeit: if you stick out, lots of bystanders make it their business to force you to conform, and the law encourages and reflects that culture.

(Argumentativeness despite ignorance, and irrational belief in one's national superiority, are other misfeatures of German culture, so you will doubtlessly respond with a litany about how (1) this isn't true despite the evidence, or (2) how other countries are worse than Germany, or (3) how beneficial all of this is and how stupid foreigners are for not seeing that. Take your pick and save us both some time and respond just with a number.)

Re:Oh Germany

[garry_g]

Those letters, "Abmahnung", are different as they have been used for many years, especially ever since computers got popular ... some of the most famous cases initially came to light when one lawyer from Munich, Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, sent those letters to hundreds or thousands of (mostly) school children for them swapping home computer games ... what made it bad was that it turned out to be some sort of entrapment in many cases ... i.e., the infamous "Tanja" or other cover identities were used to trick children into sending him pirated software, then used that to threaten the kids with suing, which could be avoided by paying the sums listed in the "Abmahnung". While at that time there were quite a few cases, it was nowhere close to what is going on nowadays ... those letters have become an easy income for some German lawyers, with little work and nice 4-digit income per letter ... often, they are also less attackable than in this case, where multiple factual and technical mistakes were made ..

Re:Oh Germany

[hweimer]

In Germany, a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist letter can ask to get paid for his services from the recipient of the letter. However, the fees associated with this (making up most of the €250 in this case) are essentially lump sums set by law that are unrelated to the acutal amount of time spent for each case. If a lawyer sends out thousands of letters, this means huge profits, which are often shared with the rightsholder through illegal kickback schemes.

This is a well-known problem, but most lawmakers (who were often legal professionals before), prosecutors, and judges see copyright violations as the bigger issue so they tend to welcome this process as a private-sector law enforcement despite the fraud that is usually associated with it.

Re:Oh Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

The Obrigkeit is responsible for creating, maintaining, and encouraging a culture of conformity, because what the German Obrigkeit has always feared is people who question and challenge it. They figured out that the best way to control a population is to have it police itself, whether it's through Stasi informants or an army of lawyers that act as police, judge, and executioner in one. And instead of rebelling, Germans obey, as they have always done (although there seems to be some slow change in attitudes).

Re:Oh Germany

[skine]

It is better to let nine innocent men be extorted than to let one guilty man go free.

Or something along those lines.

Re:Oh Germany

[ebno-10db]

Argumentativeness despite ignorance, and irrational belief in one's national superiority, are other misfeatures of German culture

You mean there's a culture those aren't misfeatures of?

They're serious?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:They're serious?

[gweihir]

The courts were tricked: The lawyers made it look like this was about file-sharing, and there the upload part can make you liable for distribution in Germany.
But there are some other peculiarities, namely how they go the IP addresses. It seems they may have gotten illegally or via fake ads on the site itself. That would then not prove anybody streamed anything. It may also be illegal to state people streamed to a court when there is no proof anybody streamed anything. Almost certainly some employee of some "piracy analysis" company committed perjury.

Bottom line is that this will hopefully cost the layers involved their accreditation and make them liable for legal cost of the ones targeted. Fees are unfortunately capped and so low that this will not pay off. The total damage is only about $15, the rest is lawyers fees.Incidentally, sending out these "Abmahnungen" en-mass, but claiming full legal fees on each (instead $5 or so) is also illegal, but a court has to determine these are mass-produced. (An "Abmahnung" is basically a form of legalized fraud by threatening people and demanding fees that only lawyers are allowed to commit. One more reason to hate that profession...)

The consent in the German legal community seems to be that these people got greedy and stupid and will fail. Problem is that if anybody pays, the fees goes directly to Switzerland (instead to the lawyers) and will there fore be hard or impossible to recover, as Switzerland is not part of the EU.

Info about "The Archive AG"

[bradley13]

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.

Re:Info about "The Archive AG"

[mystuff]

This was reported on the Dutch site Tweakers as being a hoax, as reported by the layyers office itself here. Translations here and here respectively.

What do you call a bunch of unhappy Germans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sauerkrauts.

Re:What do you call a bunch of unhappy Germans?

[mischi_amnesiac]

That would be stupid, because when used to describe a mood "sauer" means angry, not sad.

Now that summary is SO wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Criminal investigation against the lawyer

[xororand]

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.

It's not forgetting in this case

[dutchwhizzman]

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.

IP address matching flawed then?

[dutchwhizzman]

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.

Nothing new

[andyteleco]

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 figure out the people?

[IRWolfie-]

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)?

Re: Ah, so every german is a judge.

[__aajxhe7746]

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect

Re:Ah, so every german is a judge.

[sumdumass]

The DMCA type laws are requirements of intrrnational treaty that most if not all countries have adopted. These two treaties which can be found at the WIPO website, the WTC and WPPT treaties where the reason the US created the DMCA in the first place.

There is a lot more to it than US content companies lobying.

Re:If the lawyers cheated ...

[ebno-10db]

supreme ... found ... this fact was obvious to even a layman and finally the judges stated that if these lawyers ever wasted the courts time with a case like this again there would be severe consequences.

Damn. Could we import some of those German judges?

P.S. Anyone else appreciate the irony of importing German judges to improve the American system of "justice"?