86-Year Old Grandma Accused of Pirating a Zombie Game (torrentfreak.com)

An 86-year-old woman named Christine McMillan from Ontario, Canada has been accused of downloading a zombie game she's never heard of. She faces $5,000 in potential damages. From a report on TorrentFreak (condensed): McMillan is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who've been accused of copyright infringement under Canada's "notice and notice" regime. Due to a change to Canada's copyright law early last year, ISPs are now required to forward copyright infringement notices to their customers. In the letter received from anti-piracy group Canipre, she's threatened with thousands of dollars in damages, if she doesn't comply. "They didn't tell me how much I owed, they only told me that if I didn't comply, I would be liable for a fine of up to $5,000 and I could pay immediately by entering my credit card number," McMillan told Go Public. At first, McMillan thought she was dealing with spammers but Cogeco, her Internet provider, confirmed that the email with the settlement offer was legitimate. The power of the settlement scheme lies in the uncertainty people face. McMillan is obviously not happy with the notice-and-notice legislation which she brands as "foolish."

Comments

Re:thought she was dealing with spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

I am impressed an 86 year old grandmother had the general tech-awareness to imagine that as a possibility. Older folks were brought up in a time of much more trust, long before the internet was a thing, and it is very often beyond their imagining that there could be so many people intent on defrauding their fellow humans (That is not an indictment of them, it's an indictment of modern society).

Re:just wait for them to run up the legal bill 5K

[johnnys]

You're missing a very important point: Under CANADIAN law, the maximum fine for all of these downloading offenses combined is 5000$, provided she's not downloading these files for commercial infringement. She CANNOT be forced by a court to pay more than 5000$ for all the allegations no matter what happens in court!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"A copyright holder can instead elect to protect his/her copyright under section 38.1, which allows for "a sum of not less than $100 or more than $5,000 as the court considers just." for all non-commercial infringement, and $500 up to $20,000 for each commercial infringement.[30]"

This is an excellent law: It protects real Canadians from the flood of toxic lawsuits the USA citizens are suffering.

Canada had to put it in to keep the USA from implementing punitive trade barriers, but in the USA they never put a cap on it so people can get screwed over big time by huge lawsuit judgements. In Canada the 5000$ cap means that no copyright owner will ever go to court to attack a person with no commercial infringement since the 5000$ won't even cover the lawyer costs to file the suit. So these nastygrams can be safely ignored.