Golden Eye Tries Its Hand At Piracy Extortion Letters

Over recent years, there has been a trend of trying to extort money from internet users over alleged 'piracy' of particular music or movies. These have taken the form of shakedown letters threatening court action over the alleged infringement, but offering the 'option' of having them go away for a few hundred pounds. In every case, an attempt to identify the users is made by using their IP address and asking the ISP to cough up their subscriber details. This is something which the ISPs have generally been reluctant to do as turning your own customers in isn't good for business, so may take a subpoena to extract from them.

Two notorious companies that tried their hands at such extortion tactics are Davenport Lyons and ACS:Law. It didn't work out well for either of them. Davenport Lyons was forced to eventually back off after being beaten in court over their shady tactics, while ACS:Law, a one man band run by Andrew Crossley, actually went bust, owing thousands. However, this hasn't stopped others from trying the same thing from time to time: enter Golden Eye International, a company that claims to hold copyrights to the Ben Dover porn brand. They have gone to court to try and extract the subscriber details of 9000 internet connections from ISP O2 UK (Telefonica). Should they win, then these customers will each receive a shakedown letter, or 'speculative invoice' demanding £700 to make them go away. No doubt they're relying heavily on the embarrassment factor to help them win settlements.

So, what's so bad about identifying users by their IP addresses? You cannot reliably and accurately identify them, that's what. An IP address identifies only the connection owner, who isn't necessarily the person who committed the copyright infringement. Importantly, IP addresses can be hijacked, faked or redirected and the ISPs logs may be out of sync with those of the law firms. Sources of error include timezones, British summer time offset, clocks just set wrong or corrupted and faked logs and so on. Incredibly, the Digital Economy Act will use just this sort of unreliable method when it goes live soon, which is a real tragedy.

The very worst part about all this is that the big media industries have never been able to prove the alleged harm that file sharing causes them, yet are still able to draft obnoxious and repressive laws as if it did. On top of that, various independent studies have shown that file sharing at worst has a negligible effect on sales and can at times boost them. These companies always try to make out that piracy aka copying equals theft. However, nothing could be further from the truth, as nothing is taken away and the article picture illustrates this nicely.

There's more detail on this and a quote from the Open Rights Group over at ISP Review.