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Consumer magazine slams games industry

by on31 October 2008

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Dragging innocent people into court


The computer
games industry has been slammed by a U.K. consumer group for threatening to drag an middle-aged couple into court and charging them with P2P piracy.

Which? Computing said it was contacted by Gill and Ken Murdoch, from Scotland, who had been accused of sharing the game Race07 by makers Atari. However, the couple wouldn't know what a Race07 was if it bit them in broad daylight. They have never played a computer game in their lives. The case was dropped but Which fears that hundreds of others are in a similar situation.

Atari has appointed law firm Davenport Lyons to prosecute illegal file-sharers.  It is using the anti-piracy firm Logistep to find those people via their IP address. They then apply for a court order which obliges Internet service providers to hand over the account holder's details. In tactics that mirror those in the U.S., the copyright holders then send a threatening letter demanding that they pay £500 or go to court. Most of the cases seem to be when a pirate piggybacks on an unsecured wireless network.

The games companies claim that users are legally required to secure their network, although under U.K. law there is no section of the Copyright Act which makes you secure anything. Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch do not have a wireless network, so their address cannot have been hijacked in this way and it has not been established how their IP address came to be linked to file-sharing.

One reason might be that outfits like Pirate Bay have been undermining efforts by anti-piracy investigators to track down file sharers by inserting random IP addresses into their transactions.  This means that innocent people might be identified by IP addresses.
Last modified on 01 November 2008
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