I've sent a letter on friday (the one Gareth Halfacree draw for me - us) and after checking tracking record on royal mail website, i know that they've collected it. So now i'm off for a 2 weeks holiday, and i'm gonna spend money they're after ;-) ...so see you in 2 weeks time brothers in pain
Well done, nw. Please let us know how you get on when you get back from your holidays - my guess is that you won't hear from DL ever again.
Just a few remarks: Yep, that is definitely the first step I guess, and the intention of Gareth Halfacree's letter (well done btw and thanks!). As this is not a criminal but a civil case the "innocent till proven guilty" doesn't apply, unfortunately. If the judge see's a 51% possibility that you actually did what you are accuse of you are guilty as charged. So I have serious doubts as to who will be the winner here, and that depends largely on which part of the evidence the judge acually takes in as evidence. If you then are not given the possiblity to negate the evidence (which will take much much longer than just presenting the evidence), then one is not going to win this. But that is seriously wrong in my humble opinion: just throwing some IP addresses at someone, pointing the finger and then having already >60% 'votes' in your pocket - no no no. But there is no verdict on any of these cases where someone actually defended himself yet, so there will probably much more to it. As to the question of counter-suing: that is actually my only intention of not giving in to them, because I want to 'counter' sue them before they even can sue me if possible, and it would even be greater if this is a criminal case then (is violation of data protection act cause for a criminal case?). If DL loose this one, they will not stand a chance in a civil court as well. Good idea, will talk about that with my lawyer, thanks. That's my plan b if I don't get a lawyer in the meantime who tells me otherwise. Very interested in what becomes of that too. Latest news: DL are apparently going to actually sue some 100 sharers of one of their previous waves regarding this Pinball game from Topware. Which shows exactly the problem: The more letters they send, the more money they get, the more money they have to actually go against some of the 'easier' targets, they will perhaps win the civil case, and then there is no end. That's why I say: They have to be stopped, now, before they have a couple hundreds of rulings in their favour. They have apparently no chance in France, Italy and Germany any more because people sued against them and the courts ruled in their favor. No new case in Germany for example. If they don't get stopped you will not rest in peace, because for DL that's money on the street. Incidentally, it hasn't really anything to do with he question if file sharing is illegal or not. The letter states clearly that the accusation is not made because you downloaded something, but because you made it available for someone else. But if the actual downloading part is not in question, only the uploading part, then what is actually at stake here? No verdict will be made that clearly states: 'file sharing is illegal, and therefore i find you guilty...'. And if it stays a civil case you can even only say 'file sharing is 67.3% illegal', which is equivalent to '%&^(*&^%'. To be honest, I would love for someone to come up with a final definition of these things concerning copyrights and electronic media, so you finally know where you're at, and not always in between which is only good for money making. Just my personal opinion though...
I always thought that file-sharing in and of itself wasn't actually considered as piracy in the UK. It's only classed as piracy if you actually sell the copied game. I only know this because I had a friend whose house was raided, all his copied games were confiscated and he was charged with piracy. He was let off because he didn't actually sell the games. Granted, this was twenty-odd years ago, but I don't think the law has changed since then.
Nobody is being charged with 'piracy'. Nobody is being accused of breaking any law. It's a civil case of copyright infringement. It has absolutely nothing to do with what is legal and what isn't. Basically, I can bring a civil suit against you for any reason I fancy - up to and including that I don't like your name. It's then up to the courts to decide if my case has merit. The 'law' has no say in the matter, aside from 'case law' where I can refer to previous suits where individuals with silly names have been successfully sued.
I see. Not being a lawyer, I was not aware of the distinction, nor the possibility of bringing a civil suit for absolutely any reason. It does explain why the only cases to have reached the courts have been tried in absentia: were they to reach court with both parties present, DL's dodgy practices would come to light, something I'd imagine they'd be most keen to avoid. Of course, Gareth, if you were to sue me over my silly name, I'd no other recourse than to counter-sue over your silly name
Since civil cases have no juries, does that mean that it's effectively down to the judge to cast the deciding vote, as it were - if, for example, there was sufficient evidence from both parties to mean that the balance was 50:50? Or would the judge just dismiss the case out of hand if that were the case? Just wondering.
Well it wouldn't be two people arguing that each other's names are stupid. One would issue a claim, then the other guy would say why is name isn't stupid, the judge then judges which had the better argument. Then the defendant could issue a counter-claim that the other guy also had a stupid name. Saying someone else has a stupid name isn't really a good defense, you're still guilty of having a stupid name
No problem. If anyone who uses that letter could keep an eye on the forty day time limit, it'd be fun to get a bunch of complaints sent to the OIC when they inevitably ignore it. Oh, and just to clarify - the Freedom of Information Act refers to gaining access to information held by public sector organisations. It's the Data Protection Act that you need to invoke when it's a private company.
I don't think this can happen very easily with the rapid pace of technology, people will just find loopholes in the definitions and exploit it, as technically speaking they aren't breaking the law. I was reading an article recently about the difficulties of this regarding spyware/malware etc as there is no set legal definition. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't an IP address on it's own completely useless, don't you have to have a date stamp with it? As far as I'm aware ISP's will be in big trouble for handing out IP addresses without a court order. However due to their duty of care (Tort) they have a responsibility to stop any wrong doing on their networks. I'd like to re-iterate, I'm by no means a lawyer so could be wrong. There is also a big problem with suing people across boarders and which laws apply as people here have mentioned.
Thought I'd share what I was thinking after reading all this. As far as I'm aware, all the 'proof' they have is your router's external IP, the time the infringement took place (hence tying the IP to your ISP account) and the username you used on the P2P network? If so, they can't actually pin it on you directly. Only on someone using your router (either with or without your consent/knowledge) Isn't that like saying you're guilty of any crime that happens in your house? ie, you come home from work and find a corpse in your living room. You've been at work all day and you have several strong alibis. Are they still going to say you did it? <EDIT> Was just thinking about the spoofed IP thing. You can't spoof a TCP connection but I'm not sure if torrents use TCP or UDP. I believe its UDP to save traffic overheads. If so, ask them to prove someone didn't spoof your IP so it looked like you were part of the network when you weren't.
There are sections of the DPA that deal with exclusions of data and mean that information technically could be supplied without a court order, however I don't think they would apply in this case, I know of three from work (Insurance fraud department) two deal with disclosure of information for the purposes of preventing fraud and the third is a caveat allowing an address to be supplied purely for the purposes of serving proceedings. DL seem to be relying on a German court order iirc in order to obtain private data. If what Mr X has said about a German Judge ruling against them is correct then that ruling should be allowed in a UK court, if it is rejected then their should be enough grounds to petition the judge to reject the court order DL used to obtain the information and they would be left with no evidence to present a case. Any statement that they are unable to disclose all of the evidence they have due to the amount of paperwork is spurious at best. With any civil claim they have to go through pre trial disclosure and supply a copy of all evidence that they intend to rely upon to the defendant or their representative. I'm interested to see if DL respond to the DPA request though...
As I said back in the thread, you cannot spoof an IP like that. All replies from the P2P network will go to the spoofed IP, which will never respond - because it isn't expecting the P2P traffic. It's as easy to prove that someone didn't spoof your IP so it looked like you were part of the network when you weren't as it is to prove the existence of the sun. I cannot recommend anyone trying the "spoofed IP" defence in court, as you will get your ass handed to you.
It was mentioned earlier in the thread that EU Law supercedes UK law so they request the information through a company based in Germany in order to get the details. Also, Gareth is 100% correct when he says IPs cannot be spoofed. It just can't be done, not unless you don't want any return traffic... which would be rather pointless
You don't need to bring anything with you, just yourself. As I said, it's up to them to prove that you did it. The case will likely get thrown out.
concerning the spoofed ip question that people keep saying is impossible due to the data going to the spoofed if in that case why not just claim that your pc was infected with a virus and hijacked and some one downloaded the data to your pc with out your knowledge then that they must have uploaded it from your system to their system etc.
