Pretty much everyone who is up to date with file sharing news already knows about the rounds of lawsuits filed by the RIAA and MPAA on users who illegally share copyrighted music and movies online. For those who think that sharing other content such as games is less at risk, in March, a German games publisher Zuxxez sued 500 UK file-sharers for illegally sharing out its games, such as Dream Pinball 3D via P2P.
According to TorrentFreak, the company uses an automated method to gather what is claimed to be "forensic quality evidence" suitable for use in court cases. This comes after the people who received the letters started demanding evidence that they did something wrong. The anti-piracy system they used is basically a modified Shareaza client, which can configured to automatically scan for infringing files. If results are found, the client builds a list of the source IP addresses sharing the infringing content and then initiates a transfer of a small chunk of it from each result. It then builds a database of filenames, sizes, IP address hosting each given file, P2P protocol & application, Time, username and whether the requested chunk could be obtained. The application can also be configured to automatically perform a Whois look-up on each IP to obtain details about the ISP and optionally send the ISP an infringement letter about this IP.
The letters that were sent to the 500 file sharers recommend the payment of a £600 fine for the illegal sharing of the its pinball game or face prosecution and potential court costs. Like the RIAA, the game publisher will not take any excuses, whether someone ended up having their PC set up as a proxy by a virus (where someone else used to relay their file sharing application traffic) or one forgot to put encryption on their Wi-Fi, with its layers saying ignorance is no defence.
Thanks to GristyMcFisty and DamnedIfIknow for letting us know about this news. DamnedIfIknow added: So if a person steals your car and runs over and kills someone you are responsible?
