Oh-ohh...Fines posted to downloaders!

IanCurtis

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Technology/Crackdown-On-Game-Downloads-Thousands-Of-UK-Households-Hit-By-Fine-From-Lawyers-Davenport-Lyons/Article/200808315082665?lpos=Technology_2&lid=ARTICLE_15082665_Crackdown%2BOn%2BGame%2BDownloads%253A%2BThousands%2BOf%2BUK%2BHouseholds%2BHit%2BBy%2BFine%2BFrom%2BLawyers%2BDavenport%2BLyons

Kur4mA

Not really game related?

monument

"Thousands of gamers who have shared files illegally online are about to get a nasty surprise through the post - a fine for hundreds of pounds."

Err... Yes. it is.

Kur4mA

Ah, game downloaders. My bad. Well if you download a game illegally you should expect that there's the possibility of getting caught at some point.

CCCP^

**** 'em, and their law.

Cuddlesworth

Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what happens when you contest these charges?

Bye, Bye fine.

Mossy Monk

In the UK you get a big ass fine

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/game-file-sharer-hit-with-16-000-fine

Cuddlesworth

Mossy Monk wrote: »

In the UK you get a big ass fine

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/game-file-sharer-hit-with-16-000-fine

They have to prove that you downloaded the files. All the information they have is an ip. If you say that you have a un-secured wireless network they can't prove that you downloaded the file. Its a well argued point. The RIAA has already started avoiding presidents in both UK and the States as soon as soon as good lawyers are hired by pulling the cases or settling out of court.

They would also need to prove that you were supplying the full game for download. torrent files provide multiple parts of the one file to many users. This would make it difficult to maintain that the game was uploaded fully from the one user. Otherwise its just gibberish. How many games are available for download outside of torrents?

Any good lawyer will take up this case and rape them in appeal because its easy money.

I don't agree with the downloading of games but if the games industry want to see what happens with these tactics take a long good look at what exactly the RIAA has done for the music industry. And most importantly, how much money have they returned to artists from court cases and fines won. The last figure I heard was around zero.

yoyo

This info has been out for ages? Caught on E-Donkey/Gnuetella/Bit Torrent networks I belive using a version of shareaza some anti piracy company modified to monitor the networks once it became open source. Mainly over a basic 3d pinball game which is pritty hilarious, the old link from over a year ago about this is HERE

Nick

Canis Lupus

Interesting way to make money.

Make a game, distribute it on torrents etc and then send in the lawyers and watch free money come in.

humanji

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

They have to prove that you downloaded the files. All the information they have is an ip. If you say that you have a un-secured wireless network they can't prove that you downloaded the file. Its a well argued point.

I'm not sure that that excuse would work. I remember someone pointing out that you're responsible for your network and if someone was using your wireless to download pirated software, then it's tough, it's still your fault. Not sure if this is only aplicable in certain countries, but I was under the impression that this was the case for Ireland.

fitz0

How are they sure that these people have downloaded these games? Unless they have been tracking what they are doing with their connection? Thats just a little bit illegal now isnt it? Comcast found that out the hard way.

I seem to recall some trial somewhere or other where 24 files that were posted by the prosecutors and downloaded by the client were dismissed as evidence because its not illegal to share your own property.

yoyo

fitz0 wrote: »

How are they sure that these people have downloaded these games? Unless they have been tracking what they are doing with their connection? Thats just a little bit illegal now isnt it? Comcast found that out the hard way.

I seem to recall some trial somewhere or other where 24 files that were posted by the prosecutors and downloaded by the client were dismissed as evidence because its not illegal to share your own property.

Their not, however there is a law (I'm open to corection on this) that even if your net is hacked into its your responsibility what is transfered using it, however due to the inadequecy of WEP which most people are using on their routers, I'd say in court it would be a little unfair to blame the internet owner for something he/she never downloaded .
I was reading up on this last year I think it was, the way they catch you is using a modified version of the file sharing software Shareaza, This program connects to E Donkey, Gnuetella, Bit Torrent networks all in one. The shareaza devs made this program open source, and some anti piracy company modified it so it would record in a database all connections made accessing/downloading/uploading a file. Companies such as codemasters/topware seemingly paid for this service and as a result are issiueing these legal threats to people over downloading, I really can't see it being too much of an issiue though, and has anyone challenged the fine and gone to court yet? Btw source to the article about Shareaza is HERE

Nick

fitz0

So moral of the story dont use Shareaza?

MOH

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

They have to prove that you downloaded the files. All the information they have is an ip. If you say that you have a un-secured wireless network they can't prove that you downloaded the file. Its a well argued point. The RIAA has already started avoiding presidents in both UK and the States as soon as soon as good lawyers are hired by pulling the cases or settling out of court.

Not any more.

yoyo

fitz0 wrote: »

So moral of the story dont use Shareaza?

Shareaza connects to Edonkey (Emule etc...), Gnuetella (Kazaa, Limewire, Bear Share etc) and also torrents, so moral of the story use peer guardian or avoid public p2p sites

Nick

Cuddlesworth

MOH wrote: »

Not any more.

Wow, don't suppose you read the linked article.

Lawyer says accused 'sharers' should resist legal claims

This is no different to any of the RIAA cases. And when they go to court they only win when there is no good legal defence hired. And when they will lose they pull the cases and "settle".

As I said before, this is one case and will be raped on appeal if they get a good lawyer who is willing to research his stuff.

Doodee

For those of you that are interested in it, This is from the editor of GI.biz, sums up the situation nicely.

GamesIndustry.biz wrote:

"What's it going to take," I was asked recently, "to get a videogames story that isn't 'ban this sick filth' onto the front cover of a national newspaper?" Actually, I've been asked that question, paraphrased in various ways, several times in recent months, and I confess that I've never had a truly satisfactory answer (other than "Lara Croft", and plenty of newspaper editors are starting to suspect that that one's a bit old hat these days).

Yesterday, we found out the answer, and few people in the industry are terribly happy with it. After decades of ill-informed drum-bashing over violent content, the games business finally managed to get a new narrative onto a newspaper front cover - by threatening to send extortive legal letters to thousands of consumers based on extremely dubious evidence.

Having appeared on the front cover of The Times yesterday morning (in the interests of transparency, I should declare an interest here, since I am a contributor to The Times), the story developed in the media over the afternoon. Only a tragic plane crash in Spain prevented it from being more thoroughly explored in the evening bulletins of at least one major television news channel in the UK.

For that, the industry should breathe a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong - piracy is an extremely damaging and costly affair, and one which the games industry should approach in a robust, united manner, exploring all avenues to crack down on those at the heart of the piracy trade, and finding ways to change the business landscape to render consumer piracy irrelevant. It's possibly one of the greatest challenges facing the interactive entertainment industry today.

This grubby, nasty little action, however, is about as far as any games company could ever get from the right way of tackling piracy.
It's important first of all to make clear that this is not an action on the part of "the games industry". On the contrary - the games industry, as a whole, seems to want as little to do with this as possible. None of the big publishers or platform holders have touched the action with a barge pole - you won't see the names of Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo on this action. Even ELSPA, which is normally full of strong words on the matter of piracy, murmured in a carefully composed statement about how it didn't "condone" this action.

So what has actually happened, in real terms? A group of tier 2 and tier 3 companies, the largest among them being Atari and Codemasters - both firms who can turn out fine games on occasion, neither of them firms who cause the top tier of publishers to lose any sleep - have hired a firm called Davenport Lyons to take action against private individuals for using file-sharing networks to distribute games.

This, it appears, is a Davenport Lyons "speciality". It doesn't take much Google sleuthing to discover that this is a company whose reputation is coloured by a history of threats against private individuals. This is a sort of carpet-bombing, legal "shock and awe" approach which, in this case at least, may be designed to frighten people into paying a fee and signing an admission of guilt, rather than following any due legal process through the courts.

What takes a little more stone-turning to uncover is the fact that Davenport Lyons - and by extension, their clients in this matter - appear to be using data from a company called Logistep. This is an anti-piracy company which uses a variety of methods to extract user information from peer to peer file sharing services, and claims to be able to identify which Internet users have been sharing specific files.

This raises two problems. Firstly, there have been serious concerns over the legality of Logistep's methods in several European states. In the company's home country of Switzerland, it stood accused of violating the law in its pursuit of pirates, by pushing for the initiation of meaningless criminal cases against sharers and then dropping them once their ISPs had coughed up personal data on their customers. Needless to say, the Swiss authorities weren't best impressed when this behaviour came to light.

Concerns have also been raised in other European countries. In France, a lawyer who was working with Logistep was recently banned from practising law for six months for almost exactly the same behaviour which Davenport Lyons has just demonstrated in the UK. Her letters, which demanded 400 Euro from alleged sharers - while scaring the recipients with the implication that a failure to pay this money and subsequent court appearance could cost "hundreds of thousands of Euros" - were deemed to be, in essence, extortion.

Yet those debates, despite their relevance to the situation in the UK, pale in comparison to more serious problems with Logistep's methods. There is, quite simply, a vast gap between what Logistep can prove technologically, and what a court of law requires for a case to be proven.

From the documentation I've seen, it appears that all Logistep can do is link an IP address (and hence a broadband connection) to the sharing of a file with a certain filename, at a certain time. That's to be expected - there's not much other data they can collect. However, even without legal training, it's clear to me that there are huge holes in this approach. How do you prove, beyond reasonable doubt, who was using the computer in question? How do you prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the file contained the data its filename suggested?

In an age when Wi-Fi networks are abundant, and usually poorly secured, it's easy for your home connection to be hijacked by someone else - and used for nefarious purposes. Many consumers live with other adults, and share their broadband connection with them. Others even share with their neighbours, again using wi-fi. Then there's the fact that peer to peer networks are often full of fake files, which puts a serious question mark over the identification of a pirate file by filename alone.

This isn't to say that the majority of those who receive letters from Logistep will be innocent. In fact, the vast majority will probably be guilty as charged. However, a significant minority will genuinely be innocent - and frankly, even in the cases of the guilty parties, it seems to me that Davenport Lyons will have a tough day in court proving their claims if those involved find a decent, clued-up lawyer.

That's seems to be why the shock-and-awe tactics of this mass mailing are being employed. £300 or thereabouts is a nice figure - enough to sting badly, probably enough to cover the costs of the operation, but not enough for most people (innocent or guilty!) to be willing to go and hire a lawyer and fight the case. Moreover, once you've paid the £300 and admitted your guilt, you don't really have any comeback. This looks like a legal dragnet, designed to haul in as many people as possible - with little regard to whether they're actually guilty, or whether there's enough evidence for a real court case.

In that case, "grubby" doesn't begin to describe it - just as, when innocent people start receiving those letters and clamouring in large numbers to the media, as they inevitably will, "PR disaster" doesn't begin to describe what will happen next.

Fight piracy. Fight it with every weapon in the arsenal - but play fair. This kind of dirty, nasty and legally questionable action will do nothing other than bring the industry into disrepute. Certainly, some people will be scared away from the torrent and peer-to-peer networks - but is that drop in the ocean really worth it, compared to the incredible ill-will that will accrue to the industry as a whole from core consumers wrongly accused, and furious families writing to their newspapers and even MPs about these threats? Is it worth the egg on everyone's faces when Davenport Lyons' and Logistep's tactics are aired publicly, like so much filthy laundry?

Moreover, ask yourself this - have these kind of actions really done anything for the music business in the USA, other than creating strong public dislike of music publishers and their representative body, the RIAA? It has garnered a reputation for music publishers as persecutors of pensioners, the disabled and single mothers - has it stopped piracy? Of course not.

What's chipping away at music piracy is the rise of services that beat the pirates on convenience and ease of access, like iTunes, and of bands who are brave enough to change their business models to adapt to the new landscape, like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. The court cases? They've just shed decades of goodwill like a snake shedding its skin. The world would grimly applaud if a major record label went bust tomorrow.

The rest of the industry would do well, frankly, to distance itself from Codemasters, Atari and pals - not just by remaining silent, but by reassuring people that this isn't how they do business. Then, perhaps, when the ashes settle on this whole sorry affair, we can go back to asking that opening question again, in a more general tone - what's it going to take to get a positive story about games onto the front covers? Stop consorting with snakes and trying to abuse the legal system, and we might find out a hell of a lot sooner

Nick_oliveri

A woman who put a copy of Dream Pinball 3D on a file-sharing network must pay £16,000 to the games maker and its lawyers

That is officially the most fooking retarded thing i have ever read.