News - Game Pirates check your post! UK publishers sending out 25,000 letters demandi

[Jay]

kalniel, if the evidence for all accused is from the same flawed sources how to do you discriminate between the guilty and the innocent? They can't request your laptop and you don't have to hand it over. I have 5 PCs at home would I have to hand all five over? If its not criminal can they actually force you to submit your PCs / laptops? What if you torrent on 1 and don't submit it? How would they know how many PCs you have?

If this was a criminal case could this evidence be submitted, i doubt it. ISPs need to accept that they are just as responsible and the ISPs are the only ones who can really stop this. Going after a few thousand users is pointless when there are probably hundreds of millions of illegal MP3/MP4s out there, ISPs are the key here and its about time they held their hand up.

If I don't sell or produce but I get cought transporting a load of illegal goods I am guilty.... how does this not apply to ISPs?

[kalniel]

kalniel, if the evidence for all accused is from the same flawed sources how to do you discriminate between the guilty and the innocent? They can't request your laptop and you don't have to hand it over.

I meant I'd volunteer it over if I was wrongly accused.

Just because something is hard to enforce it doesn't make it right to ignore the law.

But if you didn't want to prove your innocence quickly then sure, you could go to court and face the risk of the court finding against you.

[Jay]

I agree, but the reason its so hard to enforce is because they are going about it the wrong way.

[kalniel]

I agree, but the reason its so hard to enforce is because they are going about it the wrong way.

How would you propose they catch people who are illegally downloading and sharing games then?

[Jay]

Like I said, ISPs need to sort themselves out. Only they can fix this mess. Also Steam is a pretty good way as its much harder to pirate the games.

[kalniel]

Like I said, ISPs need to sort themselves out. Only they can fix this mess.

You mean have ISPs monitor traffic more rigourously?

Also Steam is a pretty good way as its much harder to pirate the games.

How does Steam help you catch pirates?

[Jay]

ISPs need to be able to 100% tell who has what IP, thats all.

Steam makes it hard to copy games due to its digital delivery service, any games that are pirated or any users who try and bruteforce a key are banned, the issue is that people with no internet would be in a bit of a fix.

[dangel]

ISPs need to be able to 100% tell who has what IP, thats all.

Steam makes it hard to copy games due to its digital delivery service, any games that are pirated or any users who try and bruteforce a key are banned, the issue is that people with no internet would be in a bit of a fix.

Steam games are pirated just as much, it makes no odds.

Now where it wins out is convenience - it's dead easy to buy games and they come (pretty much) instantly. There's far more mileage in reducing piracy through online-value (rather than punitive DRM measures). I know people will often buy games just for the multiplayer element which is far harder to cheat (ignoring pirate servers).


I don't want my ISP monitoring everything I do for the record - just like I don't want BT listening in on every phone call I make.

[Saracen]

its a very grey area and it seems that civil action can weaken some of your rights. If this is so then the only way to prove that your are innocent is to get them to prove, without doubt that you are guilty and that would be VERY hard to do, maybe even impossible.

Its strange, on one side I 100% agree with this as people who are downloading in this way need to be stopped, but on the other some people will be tarred by the same brush and that is unfair. In my eyes you should never accuse anyone of anything unless you are 100% sure ALL the people you accuse are actually guilty and in this case I doubt that it is possible to be 100% sure.

Now I know some people will think "if you haven't done anything why worry if you get a letter?" but thats not the point, the point is that some people (most people) are not as wise to the technical side of this subject and a letter like this would worry them. My mum is 62 and she uses wireless internet, if she got a letter like this it would worry her and it could be as simple as a cloned modem or some one could have found her wireless password. If she ended up in court could she defend herself, could anyone defend her? I doubt it and she would probably have to pay the fine.

Witch hunting if you ask me.

I keep saying it, but you're missing the point, Jay.

It's a civil action.

There is no accused. There is no innocent or guilty. There will be no fine. There is no prosecution or defence. It's two parties, and a court deciding who is right. It's for the complainant to prove their case (or rather, in a civil court, it usually is, though there are some exceptions that don't apply here), and the standard of proof is effectively the balance of probability, and certainly not the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard in criminal cases.

If you like, it's the court listening to two parties who just can't agree, with the court acting as a referee while each side makes their arguments, and as an umpire that determines when shots were in or out, and who won the game.

[dangel]

accusation
Noun
1. an allegation that a person is guilty of some wrongdoing
2. a formal charge brought against a person

[Saracen]

........

If I don't sell or produce but I get cought transporting a load of illegal goods I am guilty.... how does this not apply to ISPs?

Probably via the same common carrier defence that BT would use if they were accused, for instance, of being liable for defamation because a customer used the phone to 'publish' a defamation.

[kalniel]

And the same way the manufacturer of the truck you used wouldn't get sued.

[aidanjt]

In the case of reading a website, it's hard to see how infringing copies could be seized, though I guess it's conceivable that if you copied and printed, or hosted files elsewhere, it's possible. You could certainly be injuncted against further breaches, though in practice I can't see the point. And, how could anyone establish the extent of losses they;'d incurred by you reading a webpage?

So while technically someone might be able to take court action for reading a webpage, in practice, it's a farce. But if you reuse that material and someone loses out as a result .... that's very different. A company used some of my copyright work without permission in Australia .... and I wasn't the only one it happened to. The fact that they did not have the rights to do this and that they had breached copyright was pointed out, and a settlement figure was agreed. I banked the cheque on that one, Aidan, so I have some direct experience of what I'm talking about here.

Sorry, I was out running errands.

Yes of course, you may not reproduce the works without explicit permission from the author/copyright holder, I said as much. But you can read the material even without explicit permission. I mean, you can't even read and agree with the extent of license privilages granted when there's an explicit license available without visiting the website, which means you've already made a copy of a few protected pages on your computers filesystem. If you visit a site which doesn't have licensing terms available, and you search around trying to find one to no avail, you can't reasonably be held liable for that, even though you already have a copy of several pages on your filesystem (albeit a cached copy, but still technically a copy). Granted, this is more to do with 'Fair Use', but it further demonstrates that publishing content in the public domain is implicit permission for anyone to read.

[Saracen]

Sorry, I was out running errands.

Yes of course, you may not reproduce the works without explicit permission from the author/copyright holder, I said as much. But you can read the material even without explicit permission. I mean, you can't even read and agree with the extent of license privilages granted when there's an explicit license available without visiting the website, which means you've already made a copy of a few protected pages on your computers filesystem. If you visit a site which doesn't have licensing terms available, and you search around trying to find one to no avail, you can't reasonably be held liable for that, even though you already have a copy of several pages on your filesystem (albeit a cached copy, but still technically a copy). Granted, this is more to do with 'Fair Use', but it further demonstrates that publishing content in the public domain is implicit permission for anyone to read.

No probs .... I was laying down with a thumping headache. Swap you your errands for my headache?

You have a point about temporary copies, but it certainly doesn't say anything about implicit permission to read. Temporary copies (albeit with some restrictions) are explicitly excluded from being regarded as infringing copies by s28A of the CDPA anyway, so that whole side of things is rather moot. You could, though, construe the fact that legislators took the trouble to exclude (with those restrictions I mentioned) temporary copies of being indicative of the fact that they, or legal opinion, considered that without that exemption, it could certainly be argued that they would be covered. In fact, if memory serves, there were arguments about exactly that point. There still are arguments about whether operators like Google infringe copyright when they spider, index and worse yet, archive web pages. A US court found that they had not, but a Belgian court found that under EU copyright law, they had. Fun, init?

I think you misinterpreted what I said, anyway. I said you can't infer rights to copy from an item being placed on a website. Post 110 ...

Making material available on the web does NOT infer any right to copy it other than within the copyright act's provisions or any permissions granted by the rights holder. If I write an article and put it on a website, you can reasonably infer that you can visit and read it, and that any temporary copies created in browser caches would be okay. But you can't download it, and use it on your website, or sell it to someone else.

But this is all getting rather a long way away from the subject, which was the court actions being threatened over game piracy. I'll carry on with you on this if you wish by all means, but whether you can read a webpage without written permission or not (and clearly, you can) is getting rather a long way off-topic.

[aidanjt]

No probs .... I was laying down with a thumping headache. Swap you your errands for my headache?

I'll pass

You have a point about temporary copies, but it certainly doesn't say anything about implicit permission to read. Temporary copies (albeit with some restrictions) are explicitly excluded from being regarded as infringing copies by s28A of the CDPA anyway, so that whole side of things is rather moot. You could, though, construe the fact that legislators took the trouble to exclude (with those restrictions I mentioned) temporary copies of being indicative of the fact that they, or legal opinion, considered that without that exemption, it could certainly be argued that they would be covered. In fact, if memory serves, there were arguments about exactly that point. There still are arguments about whether operators like Google infringe copyright when they spider, index and worse yet, archive web pages. A US court found that they had not, but a Belgian court found that under EU copyright law, they had. Fun, init?

lol, loads of fun, this kind of legislative confuzzlement just makes matters worse.

I think you misinterpreted what I said, anyway. I said you can't infer rights to copy from an item being placed on a website. Post 110 ...

But this is all getting rather a long way away from the subject, which was the court actions being threatened over game piracy. I'll carry on with you on this if you wish by all means, but whether you can read a webpage without written permission or not (and clearly, you can) is getting rather a long way off-topic.

I'd rather not, I'd not only compound your own headache, and get one myself.

I think we can both agree that it's a highly complex issue. But an interesting debate, never the less.

Needless to say, I'm against copyright violations, but at the same time I believe that the legalities should proceed carefully and on an individual basis.

[Jay]

So they go to Civil and say we have the IP that downloaded this game and his ISP says he had the lease on this IP.

He says, does this 100% prove that it was me using this IP? Is it possible that some one else could have the same IP as mine or spoof my IP? - Yes it is.

So where does it go from there?