Innocent UK Gamers Collateral Damage in P2P War
a couple who was accused by Atari for uploading the game "Race 07". The couple were sent a monetary demand letter by Davenport Lyons, a UK-based law firm charged with a similar responsibility by the creators of Dream Pinball 3-D. According to Which? Computing, the letter demanded “£500 compensation and £25 costs for infringing the copyright of Atari." The couple vigorously insisted that they never played a computer game in their life, and their computer was never used as a file-sharing platform. Now according to the BBC, the couple didn't even have a WIFI access point. So how did Atari and Davenport Lyons get the IP address?
In order to pursue a suspected file-sharer, the investigator needs the IP address with the correct time/date stamp. This evidence has been used to successfully settle copyright infringement cases, however, in the United States there has yet to be a single trial case where this evidence has led to a successful outcome for the entertainment industry. But it’s enough to scare people into paying up a lower cost (about $3,000) instead of facing a multi-hundred thousand dollar judgment.
To dilute the integrity of the IP address as evidence, it’s no secret that The Pirate Bay’s tracker returns random IP addresses in addition to actual peers. So when an investigator downloads a file from The Pirate Bay’s network and captures a few IP addresses, it’s very possible the captured IP could be a false or random number. It could’ve even been the Murdoch’s. No one will ever know. As TorrentFreak points out, professional firms such as BayTSP has an internal requirement to actually connect to a peer before capturing evidence, but BayTSP isn’t the only firm collecting evidence, and false positives are not outside the realm of possibility.