p2pnet news | p2p:- There’s no legal basis for launching criminal cases against file sharers, a court in Offenburg, Germany, has ruled.

The decision came after the corporate music industry tried to get an ISP to hand over the names of clients who’d been accused of being illegal online distributors of copyrighted music, says Heise Online, continuing it had received, anonymously, a copy of the, “lengthy reply of the chief public prosecutor’s office in Berlin, dated October 18, 2006″.

The letter accuses the copyright holders of trying “under cover of pretending to want to initiate criminal proceedings to obtain for free and by exploiting the limited resources of the prosecuting authorities and at the expense of the budget of the federal state of Berlin the personal data required for the successful pursuit of civil claims”.

It goes on:

The chief public prosecutor’s office in Berlin also denied that launching an investigation was in the public interest. All the offenses that had been brought to its attention were minor, the office stated. In a fashion comparable to that of the Local Court in Offenburg the chief public prosecutor’s office in Berlin also looked into the damage done by the P2P network uploads.

Contrary to the statements found in the complaint the damage done had to be regarded as “insignificant,” the office declared. Hence the criterion of “minimal culpability,” of necessity, had to result in a nolle prosequi being issued without any prior investigation.

Moreover, says Heise Online, still quoting the anonymous letter, the “deciphering of IP addresses” and search warrants were, “intrusions on basic rights, to which the principle of proportionality had to be applied,” the chief public prosecutor’s office stated.

This, “required that no investigation be launched in response to the complaints filed, the office declared. Here too the chief public prosecutor’s office points to the copyright holders’ likely motivation in filing the complaints: “Criminal-law-based investigations that entail intrusions on basic rights must not be launched for extraneous reasons — such as nothing more than a desire to obtain evidence for a civil suit.”

(Thanks, Ray)

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Also See:
Heise Online – Public prosecutors refuse to collect IP address-related information from providers, August 2, 2007

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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