The BBC is reporting that a UK campaign aimed to crack down on game piracy is targetting completely innocent people.
Citing a story in Which? Computing magazine, the BBC reports that Atari had accused an elderly couple from Scotland, Gill and Ken Murdoch, who disputed the claim saying they had never played a video game in their lives. The accusations were apparently based on an analysis of IP addresses and submitted by law firm Davenport Lyons, which was hired by Atari and other game firms to start prosecuting illegal file-sharers. In the case of the Murdochs, a letter was sent giving them the chance to pay £500 ($819) compensation or face a court case.
The couple told Which magazine:
“We do not have, and have never had, any computer game or sharing software. We did not even know what ‘peer to peer’ was until we received the letter.”
Apparently, they’re not the only ones either. The BBC spoke with Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, who claimed more and more people are being wrongly identified as illegal file-sharers. He is already pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and says more are coming.
Most likely, this is a result of a strategy Pirate Bay uses to lead investigators up a virtual garden path. What they do is insert random IP addresses of users, some of who may not even know what file sharing is, to the list of people downloading files.
Clever enough, but hopefully this won’t lead to actual prosecutions of innocent people.
Is not the real point of this story that IP addresses can be spoofed, faked, misdirected etc etc etc. Why are we still allowing them to be used as evidence in a court case ? It can clearly be demonstrated that the information is not reliable, shouldn’t we be more concerned that this wasted effort to pursue piracy will the long term add to the cost of Game and Content creation.
It’s also possabul that this is the result of a bot net, where people have downloaded malware which is being used as a proxy for the real file sharers.
Of course you’d have to be a big player in the Warez feild to go thru the hassel of running such a bot net.
I know this people, and they are not gamers…
I was talking to Gill the other day while on WoW (server – Tichondrious) and she told me they were not gamers…
I told them I knew the feeling. I don’t even know how to text…lmao…
Damn you, Al Gore, for inventing the Internet!!!! (or at least, building the legal pathway that allowed for the developement of it…whatever!)
Pursuing innocent people and making them pay fines is pretty much the UK government’s strategy for collecting stealth taxes. Not surprising then that this law firm should copy their lead.
The whole issue of film piracy is something that used to bother me a lot but now, somewhat reluctantly, I’ve had to conclude that there is nothing anyone can do about it. We live in a world of piracy which means lost revenue for us all but the potential for greater exposure for others without big marketing budgets.
http://www.mind...m/buylatte.html
The experience of Steal This Film shows that very few people “tip” the filmmakers a dollar or so for having watched the film for free but in their case I believe enough to cover the low cost of the movie. Unfortunately, then, this isn’t a business model today and it is affecting financing of “true” independent films (e.g. not those for which “indie” is a genre rather than statement of authorship).
Nevertheless, we’ve borrowed from the bloggers’ “buy me a beer” concept and implemented our “buy me a latte” which we hope might ease the conscience for some
Perhaps Atari should do the same?
Atari jumped the shark with the Atari 2600 in the mid 80’s. Now the brand resides with Infogrames, and coincidentally they finished the acquisition this month.
I hope they do something useful with it, but I’m not holding my breath.
On a lighter note, River Raid was an awesome game, and I never had “paramilitaristic tendencies” after playing it: http://en.wikip...wiki/River_Raid
This reminds of my friends father who asked him why I am billed in my phone for PMS, it turned out he was referring to SMS
which he was billed for which he never used.
Why you block my IP Dimmy?
Why you do dis to me, Dimmy?
Dimmy?
“You’re not my mother!”
This post could have been written a little better. It’s not clear how Atari got the list of IPs.
You’ve blocked me, but I am figuring it out…
W.E.B.A.R.O.O
H.U.S.I.C.K.
This is a story originally started in August, when Atari, Codemasters and a number of other firms went after illegal file-sharers. The publishing trade body did not condone it, one commentator pointed to a case in France which was close to “legalised extortion”. Now that Atari has set this hare loose, it will run and run.
Grandson downloading games while grandpa sleeps ugh?
What the hell? They should by ANY MEANS sue those very bad companies against false accusation !
This is a total power abuse by companies, plus it IS terrorism.
This is why I stopped pirating media. Its not that I felt some sort of moral responsibility to actually pay for my media, it was that random innocent people were going to court for things people like me were doing.
This is why i will never stop pirating media. Monster companies are taking people to courts, while they earn millions they ask 2 elderly people to pay 500 pounds. and that, in this day and age, called justice.