Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business | Techdirt
Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business
from the pay-up-or-we'll-sue dept
We've covered a few different stories of companies that have been involved in what certainly has a lot of similarities to extortion: sending automated letters insisting that you're violating the law, and demanding payment to prevent a lawsuit. DirecTV was one of the first companies to put a big push behind such a revenue stream, but it was eventually shot down by the courts. The RIAA, of course, has used such a program for a while. More recently, we've seen some companies in Europe experiment with similar programs. The latest is Nexicon, a former cigarette retailer that's now rebuilt itself as an automated legal threat sender, scanning BitTorrent for what it believes is infringing content, and dashing off automated legal notices, demanding payment within 10 days, and suggesting that simply paying up is a lot cheaper than even contacting a lawyer. At what point do politicians realize just how badly the system is being abused? Or do they just let this sort of activity continue?
In the meantime, it looks like ACS:Law, which is one of the organizations that's been involved in a similar settle-or-we'll-sue letter sending campaign has been outed as sending bogus letters to people who had nothing to do with the content they're alleged to have infringed upon. The most amazing thing? The companies involved seem to admit it. In a letter used by multiple firms, they note that "We do not claim that your computer was used to commit the infringing act (although we do not exclude this possibility), nor do we claim that you downloaded our client's work. Our claim is that your Internet connection was used to make our client's work available via one or more P2P networks. The file may not, therefore, be on your computer." But they still want you to pay up, of course. It's guilty until proven innocent, because that's a lot more lucrative.
Automated Copyright Settlement Letters Apparently A Lucrative Business | Techdirt
1 comment:
I disagree with this. After all, IP address logs don't prove the identity of the person who downloaded it, nor do they even prove the identity of the person's computer it was that downloaded it. More importantly, I think one should have a right to request a forensic examination, and the copyright holders should examine every serious case of innocence they receive.
Something as simple as any one of the following can make the automated enforcement bots point to the wrong person:
* Computer has multiple users (such as roommates or officemates sharing a computer, or the computer is a public computer or a computer in a computer lab)
* User brings his/her laptop to another location outside his/her home or office and connects (such as a docking port or wi-fi). These are often found in libraries, schools, colleges, offices, conference rooms, coffee shops, fast food resturants, hotels, motels, ballrooms, convention centers, and a number of other places).
* users behind a proxy server or VPN connection will show as coming from the wrong location when the bots detect them.
* Many places use a routers that perform "Network Address Translation", in which one external IP address is routed to a large number of computers on a home, company, school, or university's internal LAN. I know a school where over 200 computers were sharing one external IP address. All the computers behind the NAT router will show as coming from the same IP. Many inexpensive wi-fi routers and homes with roommates do this as well.
All of this being said, I would discontinue the use of automated enforcement letters, unless you take action to make sure there are no innocent victims and work to make sure that all innocent victims cases are dropped with prejudice and that the victims do not have to pay attorneys fees. If it were me, I would drop the program all together and just license LimeWire and BitTorrent.
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