Publishers to fine 25,000 game pirates

via Eurogamer


Five games companies are to demand 25,000 file-sharing internet users to pay GBP 300 immediately or risk going to court.

The users are being targeted for downloading and sharing games illegally, according to The Times.

Atari, Codemasters, Reality Pump, Techland and Topware Interactive have appointed legal brain Davenport Lyons to take action on their behalf.

Operation Flashpoint by Codemasters was apparently downloaded over 691,000 times in one week, according to internet watcher Peerland.

"Our clients were incensed by the level of illegal downloading," said Roger Billens from Peerland.

The quintet make their stand after the successful prosecution Isabella Barwinska, who has been fined GBP 16,000 for uploading and sharing Dream Pinball 3D by Topware.

The group will begin by targeting the first 500 file-sharers to ignore the GBP 300 demand, and have applied to the High Court to demand internet service providers deliver the names and addresses of all 25,000 breaking the law.

According to The Times, 5000 addresses have already been obtained.

Nice job. Of course, there are a lot more of these pirates there.

While PC gaming piracy is getting a bit crazy, fining everyone £300 each is quite mad. The punishment hardly fits the crime; what game costs £300? If I were a company and this happened I'd make my product easy to pirate because you'd make more profit this way than if every one of those downloaders bought it in the first place.

Yes but these fines are put in place as a deterrent- £300 is a lot of money. I wouldn't pirate anyway but now I know you can be caught and fined its definitely not worth doing.

It is also to compensate for the loss caused by piracy as a whole, not just by the individual.

But you aren't allowed to put fines in place as a deterrent for this sort of thing, as the money is supposed to be damages. Clearly, £300 is unreasonable for damages in this case.

wow man, this is just crazy, Off course I want pirating to stop to allow more games come out and stuff but why dont these pirates learn?

1. stop pirating or 2. keep gambling your luck and get a anoymous proxy downloader and get a torrent client which does not upload or does not display an ip..

wow £300 is like $620.

well, then you take it to court, but risk loosing even more (like that other unfortunate woman). sneaky tactics for sure, have there been examples of this in other industries?

I let my friend borrow my mario kart wii last week but thats ok because its completely different from sharing games over the internet.

@ Khorney yes thats why i said risk gambling at the start of my post.

@ gold line thats completely different from pirating, say if you dumped the game and then you let ur friend have the copy thats pirating but that way no one finds out anyway.

Now when my room mate stole some of my stuff and I called the police, they came and told me that I was basically screwed. I could file a police report but nothing would probably happen. But when some big company gets something stolen they get the price x10 or more?

On top of that, I can imagine its easier to prove my room mate had stuff that i purchased (since its all tangible), than some person really was using that IP address to download or upload some intangible software. People have friends and families. People share networks. I don't get how they can prove any of this. It sounds like guilty before innocent.

I'm not saying piracy isn't bad. But I'm sick and tired of laws protecting only the rich of the world.

Don't fall into the trap of assuming laws are always right.
Legally, yes, copying a copyrighted material is a crime.

But think about it logically.

Laws like the DMCA act on the premise that downloading a piece of copyrighted material will somehow hurt the author of that material.

Generally speaking, that if the person made a commercial product (digital software, games, music, etc) then by downloading it, you are taking money out of their pocket.

This in not a logically valid argument. The arguer assumes that the person who downloaded the material would have purchased it if they could not get it for free. While this is true for a few things (like EPIC games and music) it's certainly NOT true about everything.
Do you know how many Wiiware games I've 'pirated' and then decided were WORTHLESS and actually deleted? Most. In fact I've only kept two, and I STILL wouldn't have paid the expensive prices for them if I could not download them.

Secondly, how often do you see other copyrighted material being offensively horded? Most images are freely available online, regardless of their copyright owner's intentions and desires.

No no, this isn't about intellectual property, nor is it about 'protecting the author and their copyright'.

This is about money.
And the logical fallacy you must make in order to argue that piracy somehow 'takes money from the author' is too big for the issue to go unnoticed.

Copyright laws SUPPRESS our freedom to run whatever digital code we want. We can't decide what to do with our own electrons anymore.
Electrons WE purchased!
We can't control the magnetism of our own hard discs anymore!

You wouldn't steal a car would you?
No.
But if you could copy that car at no loss to the integrity of the original car, then why not?

Think before you fall prey to the industry and their bad arguments for destroying your freedoms.

I agree with elk :)
and for frick sake, if your gonna pirate start using the proper things, using a torrent or using something a bit more anonymous, like protected rapidshare links or something.

she had to pay 16000 total, 10,000 in legal fees and 6,000 for damages, seems like a lot, but because she used p2p she helped others "steal" the game, thats why its more than the price of the game.

que?

well... i guess that's a pretty expensive game then:p

it's great to live in sweden cus no one cares about that little green dot on the map:)

25,000!!!

Good Lord! That would cost them 25 million in court costs. It would take the courts 25 years.

Is this a joke or what. I cant even imagine where thay would keep all the files. What, they just send them all fines without a chance in court. I don't think so. This kind of stuff is difficult. Just one of them is.

I have spent $50 dollars on lots of crappy games.
This makes me want to stop buying them. Especially when they turn around and sell them for $10 a little while later.

How is this not blackmail?

Isn't blackmail a crime?

No it isn't blackmail. I think a lot of people here don't understand the law at work here.

They are demanding a £300 "fine". These people have broken the law and the law states these game publishers are entitled for compensation for that, in the individual case, taken to court, it was £6000. The £300 is simply an out of court setlement, except the publishers are making it perfectly clear they won't except any less, and as previous court cases have failed it is very likely anyone who takes the fine to court will also fail. It might be compenstion, but the companies will use it as a deterrent, to put people off cloning their games.

The reason it's £300 is its damages. The price of the game is irrelevant, by copying a game and distributing, or downloading it and distributing as is the case with many p2p networks, the publishers are losing money. If i copy a game and then my punishment is simply paying the full price for the game, what do I have to lose over buying the game from a shop?

And this "big company can survive if I pirate games I [supposedly] wouldn't buy anyway" is wrong.

There is no way everybody who pirates games wouldn't buy any of the games they pirate, look at music priacy, how much does a song cost?

The way a company works is a company borrows money, invests money developing a product, sells product, pays debt and anything left over is profit. If a company doesn't make enough money to pay off the debts the company becomes bankrupt, assets will be sold off to pay for debts and people will be layed off, and the share value will plument, possibly become worthless. You might not care about this, but this is the sort of thing thats causing the credit crunch right now, wondered why the pirce of capital affects economic growth? Less capital being shared between the banks means businesses are getting less credit than they were, and therefore can't operate to the same level.

And about using sharing networks as a defence, it isn't. Firstly the case that has gone to court has proably proven this as lawyers would try it from every angle, and as this isn't criminal law I'm not sure the burden of proof applies, it is a possibility it wasn't you, but there is a very good chance it was (I **think** thats how civil court cases work, correct me if I'm wrong). Also, owning and managing a network means it is your responsibility to keep that network secure, any crime on the network is your responsibility.

But you aren't allowed to use these fines as deterrents. They're by law supposed to be damages, and if you charge everyone who downloaded it £300 then that's far, far more than the actual damage anyone's theoretically caused.
Besides, what's the difference between 43 and 44 seeders? Somebody seeding a file when loads of others are too isn't really a direct case of making available, since it's already there.