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.'"

How does he know it's not a scam?

[Penguinisto]

Demand a copy of the "forensic evidence" in full, then double-check it with your ISP (and if you can, your own computer). Not 100% sure ab't the UK, but in the US, you do have the right to demand this.

/P

Eh?

[neokushan]

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?

Re:Here's your warning:

[Chrontius]

My biggish town has no shops - and believe me I've looked - and while there's Ebay, I usually find everything I play while browsing through the shelves. No charity shops here sell anything newer than Quake 3, and I'm lucky to find anything that isn't bottom-shelf (Cabbage Patch Girls games &c) at garage sales.

Re:What proof

[mgblst]

Yeah, but clearly the guy is guilty, and they know that. They also know that he is unlikely to have £1000s to fight for his rights in court, as well as all the stigma invovled if the papers get interested, affecting his future job. Whatever he demands from them, he has no rights until it goes before a judge.

You really shouldn't be downloading illegal stuff anymore.

To add even more to the injury...

[marco.antonio.costa]

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.

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[account_deleted]

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Why pay to get the letter?

[ktappe]

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?

Dont forget to recycle that paper!

[PhreakOfTime]

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 [demystify.info] 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 [willcounty...tcourt.com]

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.

Opportunity cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Opportunity cost would like to argue with you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [wikipedia.org]

Given the low rates of successful persecution vs the number of illegal file sharers, your individual chance of having to pay a settlement is rather small. Thus the opportunity cost of illegally copying a game over buying it or other games is small. Most people commit many finable offences (littering and traffic violations being the major ones), most just have a minuscule chance of being detected.

"Demanding money with menace"

[s0litaire]

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...

From TFA

[L4t3r4lu5]

"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.

Re:Tell them this

[eldorel]

Yeah, but you can go to the dealership and take the Ferrari for a test drive. If they don't have a demo available, I'm not paying unless word of mouth makes it seem worth it.

I have pirated games to try them, and if they are good, I buy them. Usually multiple copies for myself and my friends. (We have weekly lan parties, and I supply the extra systems for new people)

I'm not about to buy 4 copies of a game, and have my friends buy copies, just to discover that the multiplayer sucks horribly.
As a matter of fact, I purchased a game just a few weeks ago that played great up until we hit 3 players on the network, then the game bogged down and lagged itself to death. Fortunately, I had only purchased the one copy, and no-cd cracked it on the other systems for testing.

Software retailers don't take games back. I'm not gambling $100+ on something that I can easily test out first.

Re:Here's your warning:

[JustinOpinion]

It's an expensive offence to commit

Interesting. I had the opposite reaction.

A £600 fine? That's nothing! Think about the probability of being caught. If you look at the number of users on a typical torrent site (tens of thousands for a popular file), and the number of torrent sites (dozens)... and then compare that to the number of cases actually being brought against suspected infringers... Well, the probability of being accused is quite low.

That low probability multiplied by a ~$1,000 fine is, really, not much (certainly much less than actually buying the game for the retail price). So the expectation cost for illegally downloading it is lower than the expectation cost for buying it from a store. And most people could pay off a fine that like quite quickly (I'm not saying they would be happy about it, but it wouldn't ruin them).

The scarier stuff are things like the $220,000 fine [slashdot.org] the RIAA managed to get. Court fees and fines like that (multiple infringements at $9000 each) can indeed ruin a person's life. But if copyright infringement were just treated as a minor infraction with a capped fine (like how speeding is), then it really wouldn't be dangerous to infringe.

(No doubt that's one of the reasons that most people do violate copyright at some point or other; the enforcement is, in reality, so sporadic that there's almost no chance of getting caught.)

Re:Failure on Postage?

[JaJ_D]

Just to clarify.... INAL

From my understand a legal document is only considered "legal" when it is signed, sealed and delivered (know this is true for contracts, think it is also applic with documents like this - inferred contract?). So since the letter didn't have enough postage, technically it wasn't delivered

So my gut feeling would be that the letter isn't legally binding. Would be fun to argue in court

Jaj

Secondhand vs Sharing?

[Bragador]

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.

Re:Here's your warning:

[gad_zuki!]

>If you read the article, the reader claims he never downloaded the game in the first place, nor can he find an evidence of it.

Your honor, the gloves clearly dont fit! [guardian.co.uk] Putting the defendant in charge of evidence usually produces the same results.

Re:Failure on Postage?

[m.ducharme]

In my jurisdiction, service is legal if you can prove that the other guy received it. In this case, the fact that he had to pay for part of the postage would constitute proof of receipt. I know that when dealing with other firms, a fax confirmation sheet is enough to show that the other office received the document, whether or not they ever printed it off their fax machine. The same would apply to e-mails where a return-on-open message is received.

Re:How does he know it's not a scam?

[enjo13]

Its not uncommon for someone to have a small breadcrumb of evidence that would not likely result in penalties in court. However you send an ominous letter threatening to sue counting on the fact that the defendant knows that he is guilty. They'll pay up now, rather than risk bigger problems and costs in a court trial. In this case your gambling: Do they have worthwhile evidence or not? They're not going to tell you one way or the other.

Threatening to sue isn't extortion - just silly

[monktus]

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.

Re:Tell them this

[Original Replica]

"Oh no your Honor I didn't steal the game, I simple facilitated an unintended demo release." Good luck with that one.
For the lawyers out there, Is there any kind of requirement to allow for a return of an untestable product if it proves unsatisfactory? Honest game reviews are only written by consumers and are often overrun by paid reviews and marketing postings in "Consumer Review" listings, so a worthless product is quite difficult to detect and as the parent post points out "software retailers don't take games back." Is there a way to demand a refund from a software company in exchange for invalidating our license?(which we don't need because the software isn't worth using)

Re:Failure on Postage?

[Reziac]

Making sure the defendant won't have time to respond is an old and oft-used trick. I would guess that's what happened here -- the letters were *deliberately* underpostaged, so that in no case would the defendant have the full two weeks to decide what to do. Whether this is still a binding letter probably varies by jurisdiction. In some areas, merely a "reasonable attempt to notify" is required, NOT an actual delivery.

A similar trick I've personally seen used for a sheriff's sale, where a member of that sheriff's department wanted to ensure that he would be the only bidder present, and that the owner would be unable to redeem his property: Legal notice of sale has to be posted in a public place. So... the legal notice was posted on a building at the fairgrounds. Which are technically "public" but in fact were locked and inaccessable for the whole notification period.

Just ignore it

[onida]

A friend of mine got a virtually identical letter for the same offense (downloading Two Worlds). He just completely ignored the letter and has never heard anything back since. This company has sent hundreds of these letters out around the UK. My guess is that they've just cast a wide net and are looking to see what they catch. Anyone who responds to them is actually in more trouble than people who just ignore it.

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

[Miseph]

"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.

Re:Tell them this

[Em Adespoton]

That argument will work when you can stumble across a Ferrari on the internet and download it out of curiosity.

A better comparison would be money itself. I don't really need any Pesos, so I don't buy any on the foreign exchange. If I come across an unsecured account online, I can't just transfer some of it over to my own name, no matter how worthless it is. I also can't launder my own (although money laundering another country's money is a bit of a legal grey area I guess).

Hard currency is one of those things that it is perfectly possible to duplicate (sometimes at low cost) but also completely illegal to duplicate.

In the future, let's switch from car analogies to currency analogies. They make more cents :)

Re:They're screwed.

[canajin56]

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!

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Tell them this

[pimpimpim]

Actually, German law should allow for you to return a product ordered over the internet within something like two to four weeks, no questions asked. Digital media might be an exception there, though, due to copying. Then again if the company provided the game with copy protection you might be able to show that ,due to it not being copyable, it should be treated as any other good ordered over the internet.