A couple in Scotland were accused by Atari of file sharing and playing a game they’ve never heard of, let alone played. It’s all part of a fun new thing where someone can use your computer’s ID on lists of downloads and get you charged.
The game they never heard of but were accused of sharing was
Race07.
They really should know better. As if it’s not bad enough that Insanity Inc., aka the music industry, has been conducting a jihad against file sharing. These guys are adding evidence to encourage the witch hunts and gaga legislation. The impression of “piracy”, to those who don’t know better, will be that the poor impoverished industries are being persecuted by people daring to use their computers.
Gill and Ken Murdoch, hit with a £500 demand for payment from Atari's lawyers, contacted Which Magazine regarding their problem, which was quite bizarre, even by legal standards.
As
the BBC reports:
The couple told Which they had never played a computer game in their lives.
The case was dropped, but Which estimates that hundreds of others are in a similar situation. The illegal sharing of music, movies and games has become a huge headache for copyright owners. Some six million people are thought to illegally share files each year, and increasingly firms are getting tough on the pirates. They are monitoring peer-to-peer sharing networks, such as Gnutella, BitTorrent, and eDonkey, that allow games, music and video to be shared.
Leaving out the “huge headache” bit, which is debatable in terms of the fantastic retail prices of these products, that’s not good news for anyone, particularly the billions of people online.
It means that the whole online world can be used as a human shield for people making a few bucks out of file sharing, while this monitoring plods inaccurately through the global download lists.
The legal process involves getting the user's computer ID, known as an IP, then getting a court order to make the Internet Service Provider to give account details. The copyright owners then demand payment or threaten court action.
This inelegant process falls to bits when people start adding IP addresses which are like the Murdochs, people who don't even know what they're being accused of doing. It means that the monitoring is ineffectual to at least some degree, and that people are accused of “crimes” they don’t even understand, let alone commit.
The BBC doesn’t mention this, but there are a few risks in formally accusing people of committing offenses, too. There’s a responsibility on anyone to make accusations on the basis of more than what is essentially a phone book full of numbers, many of which are obviously wrong.
If you’re also attempting to obtain payment from people on the strength of what may well be a wrong number, you’re quite probably going beyond your legal rights.
This method “monitors”, but it doesn’t know what it’s monitoring, from the look of this. Anonymizers have been around for years. Is anyone really so stupid that they’d leave their own computer ID visible?
A lot of major software, for the last ten years, has included ways of blocking identification of computers, too. That’s not illegal, nor are browsers which are designed not to identify users.
Nor is a bogus IP exactly unlikely. There’s no reason to believe that people who are making money out of file sharing wouldn’t think of covering their tracks. Those IP lists are at best those of people who didn’t know any better, not expert copyright offenders.
According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers.
He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to "hundreds" of others, he told the BBC.
Mr. Coyle has encountered the ridiculous, too:
Most commonly problems arise when a pirate steals someone else's network connection by "piggybacking" on their unsecured wireless network, he said.
While prosecutors argue that users are legally required to secure their network, Mr Coyle dismisses this.
"There is no section of the Copyright Act which makes you secure your network although it is commonsense to do so," he said.
No, Virginia, users are not legally required to “secure” their computers.
Nor can there be, on that basis, because it’s like telling someone to lock their door in case they get arrested for a crime they didn’t commit.
They’re advised to secure their wireless networks, for obvious reasons, not obliged by law. Wireless service providers should secure their networks, for obvious reason, many do, and obviously it doesn’t work, anyway.
Now the great news. After informing its readers that firms like Pirate Bay are sabotaging the monitoring process, the BBC adds, on a reassuring note:
Despite the problems, rights owners are successfully suing pirates.
In a landmark case in August, games firm Topware Interactive won more than £16,000 following legal action against Londoner Isabella Barwinska who shared a copy of the game Dream Pinball 3D.
It is widely expected that the music industry will follow the lead of the games firms and begin prosecutions next year.
The copyright laws are now working almost exclusively for parasites like the music industry and games companies that can’t even be bothered to find out if they’re charging the right people.
Some law enforcement. “Accusation is proof” would seem to be the moral. You’d think so many wrong calls over piracy would ring a few bells, but evidently not.
This isn’t law. It’s built in inefficiency with lawyers attached to it.
World War Ten will be fought over things like this.
If anyone wants to see rational thinking on the subject of file sharing, this is not how to do it. Stop encouraging these maniacs, and stop giving them reasons to prosecute innocent people for trivial or non-existent things.
