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.'"

Failure on Postage?

I would call that horribly ineffective service. I hope the court would agree. You should never pay to know you're sued ;)

Re:Failure on Postage?

I would absolutely agree that they've demonstrated incompetence at best, and have wilfully wasted time before the deadline at worst - to me this throws into question a lot of things about their case. Where did the evidence come from, for example? I've actually been wondering about that for a while when people are found to have 'x' infringing content on their machine; how do the lawyers know what you have downloaded? At what level are they monitoring us, and who are they cooperating with to do so?

Re:Failure on Postage?

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

Re:Failure on Postage?

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.

Re:Failure on Postage?

Obligatory ;)

"'...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.'
'But the plans were on display...'
'On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.'
'That's the display department.'
'With a torch.'
'Ah, well the lights had probably gone.'
'So had the stairs.'
'But look you found the notice didn't you?'
'Yes,' said Arthur, 'yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'"

Re:Failure on Postage?

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.

I'm pretty sure that in those cases any interested party could get the sale reversed as invalid under an equity ruling. The posting may meet the legal requirements, but the posting alone does not make the sale valid. Rather the lack of posting makes the sale invalid. The sale could be contested on the point of not being a public sale, as the public was not capable of being aware of the sale. The notice being posted may however prevent the ability to receive damages beyond the injunction forcing the re-sale.

Re:Failure on Postage?

I wonder... is the fact that they can now prove he received the letter the reason that it was sent postage due? Is this the el-cheapo way to prove receipt without paying for certified/registered delivery?

DO NOT DO THIS:

Put the address of where you want to send the letter as the return address. Then put your own address as the recipient. Don't put postage on the letter and mail it out.

Again, don't do this as it's called mail fraud and will plop you in federal prison for an extended vacation.

Re:Failure on Postage?

This is partially why I was questioning their competence - they aren't trying to sue for distribution, they're suing for the act of having downloaded the game. If they simply jump onto the torrent and write down the IP addresses of the peers they have no evidence of anything other than the fact that the peer appeared to be sharing that file and possibly that they uploaded the sections that the lawyers' machine received. They have no idea whether the file was downloaded or placed there legitimately, and if they want to sue the user for distributing that copy then they should make that clear in their case.

Again, I would question their competence for trying to accuse someone of making an illegal download without sufficient evidence - all that they have evidence of is 'making available' (and we all know that that has been called into question recently) or perhaps of uploading to their machine. If they do, in fact, have evidence of downloading then I would question what further corroborating information the ISPs have been providing.

Reading back this post, I realise how weasel-worded it sounds and how much it is based on seemingly insignificant technicalities, but to be frank that is exactly how litigation is often performed and large companies have proved time and again that they have no interest in the spirit of the laws beyond the extent that they are of benefit to them. All I suggest is that we take the same attitude in return.

Re:Failure on Postage?

Um, no...

RIAA is suing a guy who's homeless. Where do you hook up a computer in a cardboard box?

Re:Failure on Postage?

Reading the details of the homeless case shows that they tried (inadequately and improperly) to serve him when he was homeless; but that the alleged infringement occurred while he was living at the address they tried to use to contact him.

Re:Failure on Postage?

So what you're saying is, downloading music makes you turn homeless!! Why didn't the RIAA tell us before???

Re:Failure on Postage?

It's not "incompetence at best" to screw up the newly changed postage pricing system, especially if they're when posting from overseas. It's just a mistake.

It is, for a number of reasons:

1. The lawyer, at least according to the summary, is from London. He's not posting from overseas.
2. This "recent change" was well over a year ago.
3. The lawyer is a lawyer. (Well, in UK terms a solicitor, but it amounts to the same thing). They send things of varying size by post all the time. The idea that they're not aware of the rules regarding how much postage has to be paid is for all practical purposes unthinkable. If they are aware, they intentionally screwed up so they're malicious. If they're not aware, that means they don't know how much they have to pay to post any given set of documents. Seeing as these rules have been in place for some time and a large chunk of their job involves posting documents, I think it's fair to describe such ignorance as constituting incompetence.

Hmm

killall -9 *orrent*
rm -rf /mnt/storage/downloads/*

There, I should be safe now.

Tell them this

Tell Zuxxez you'll pay when they make something that's worth money. At the moment, they can starve for all I care.

Re:Tell them this

If you don't think it is worth the money, you just don't buy it. You don't obtain it illegally. I don't think Ferraris are worth the money either, but I can't just go take one from the dealership or someone else that has one. I know we're not supposed to compare physical objects when discussing music, but this is software and comes in a box when purchased legitimately.

Re:Tell them this

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:Tell them this

Additionally: Many times the demo is fake, or a misrepresentation of the game's quality. For the best example of this, play Dungeon Lords (or better yet, don't. Also don't buy Dungeon Lords 2). They finished exactly as much content in the game as was in the first dungeon+town. Later towns lacked anything except a random structure with a NPC in it, and at least two times during the story the player had to enable no-clip to proceed due to unfinished parts of the game.

Re:Tell them this

"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:Tell them this

The reason you're not supposed to compare physical objects and digital objects is that they're nothing alike. It's like comparing a Ferrari and a dodo to figure out how mass transportation ought to work. It's complete nonsense.

Here's your warning:

Don't do it. Don't engage in the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials. No joke, no troll. It's an expensive offence to commit, due to its often exponential growth in damages, and most people can't afford it. If you can't afford the thousands it takes to settle these cases, then just stop doing it right now. Go on. If you "need" a game, have a look at some of the free (in either sense) games floating around on the internet, or buy some quality second-hand, or older, cheap, but still very good games at your local games store. It's going to be a helluva lot cheaper than paying any settlement, believe me.

Re:Here's your warning:

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.

Re:Here's your warning:

>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:

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

Re:

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:Here's your warning:

In order to take something from the local green grocer I have to DEPRIVE HIM OF IT.

I don't have to do that with the latest PC game.

Might give the studio owner an ulcer because his sense of control is offended but that's about it...

For THAT!?

Zuxxez wants 600 quid for TWO WORLDS!? They should be paying US to play that piece of shit! Not only was that game completely unplayable, it was buggy as shit as well!

They whined that it was improperly compared to Oblivion. If it wasn't for those comparisons, no one would have even cared about their piece of shit game in the first place. So since they care more about punishing the few people that download the game (or not; we don't know what these "forensics" are) a lot more than making a game that doesn't suck, they can fuck off.

This is where you say...

Return to Sender. Then disappear and join the Foreign Legion.

Sorting office

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.'"

Damn, I didn't realize the lines there were that bad.

Re:

Well, "If There's One Thing an Englishman Knows, It's How to Queue."

How does he know it's not a scam?

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

Worthless

Everything I've read about both Davenport Lyons and Zuxxez makes them look pretty shady since they are using MAFIAA tactics to extort money from people, many of whom are innocent but their guilty until proven innocent outlook doesn't help. They went after 500 people last year for that stupid pinball game, and even went so far as to ask people for details/documentation about their computers and routers, all outside of court mind you, so it's another story of IP renegades run amuck.

Eh?

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?

What proof

I would ask them for their forensic evidence it was you that downloaded the game. I would also request your ISP for the information that they provided to the company against the Data Protection Act and politely inform them that if they did provide this information then they would be next in line for divulging your personal details. I would request from the lawyers copies of all the details provided by your ISP. I would also be informing them that their collection and use of your personal details without your approval will be met by even more stringent regulations under British law. I would also contact the Citizen's Advice Bureau to discuss with them how you should proceed and for them to put you in touch with a lawyer/association. At the brunt of this, you have to pay for your ISP to have provided the information. This means that your ISP charged for providing them the information, ergo they sold the information to a third-party. I would have their necks if my ISP did this. Karem

Re:

The other, easier, option is just to forget about it. From what I gather, Davenport Lyons have a 100% not-following-up-on-people-who-don't-pay record.

Why pay to get the letter?

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?

So?

What, aside from the lol forgot stamps bit, is the point of this story. Guy infringes copyright, gets sued. So? Are we supposed to be conditioned to find every case of copyright enforcement to be outrageous?

Dont forget to recycle that paper!

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.

"Demanding money with menace"

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

"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.

That Really Zuxxez

Couldn't resist the bad pun, sorry.

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

I have moderator points, but there's no option for 'wrong'.

The current exchange rate is almost US$2 per 1 british pound. At the current exchange rate [google.com], it'd be $1158.

Re:

Thanks for the postage price conversion, but what about the demand itself?

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

At today's exchange rates, £600 is about $1,173.15. How old are your figures?

Mod me down please

I accidentally converted to Euro. Thanks for correcting my mistake.

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

And Americans tend to swap the currency signs when pricing things for sale over here ...

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

This is Slashdot. News for nerds. Don't multiply by two - just bitshift left by one.

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

"Because anybody who thinks that something intangible is "property" has shit for brains."

Bull fucking shit.

I believe that trees are common property of everyone. It is good for the world and I don't care who's land it belongs on...thus anything made of wood should be up for the taking. Anyone that thinks something tangible should be property has shit for brains. I don't care how you frame it, the only thing that belongs to any of us are our thoughts. As such, the only real property is intellectual property.

You see how this works?

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.

So the point is, grow the fuck up. You want YOUR intellectual property given away for free, GPL it. Or CC it. Or otherwise. Maybe if enough others feel the same, you can turn the tide, but that doesn't make the fact that you own your ideas any less significant.

There has to be a reason I don't come to Slashdot any more. It is pretty bad when Digg and Reddit has more mature comments these days...

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

No, your argument is bullshit.

Just because you can create an opinion doesn't make it so. Property is a social contract in ANY sense of the word.

On the contrary, property is the natural consequence of the physical fact that two people can't use the same tangible artifact at the same time. This is exactly the opposite of so-called "intellectual property," which not only naturally duplicates itself and is almost impossible to prevent from duplicating itself, but also only becomes valuable as a consequence of the duplication itself! (For example, would Shakespeare's plays have had any value whatsoever if he had never communicated them to anybody else? No!)

In other words, real property is based on, and compatible with, physical reality. "Intellectual property" is based on lawyers' imaginations and is incompatible with physical reality.

Re:Slashdot.co.uk?

"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.