DigiProtect ‘RIAA-style tactics’ in the US
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- “An anonymous correspondent has written to us, indicating that the German company ‘Digiprotect’, which engages in RIAA-style tactics on a contingent basis in Europe, is now operating in the United States,” says Ray Beckerman on Recording Industry vs The People.
“If you have any information on Digiprotect demanding ’settlements’ from US residents, I would appreciate your letting me know about it, either by submitting a comment to this post, or by email,” he says.
Sharing hardcore porn movies
If you’re in Europe, you may already have come across Digiprotect.
“Thousands of internet users have been told they’ll be taken to court unless they pay hundreds of pounds for illegally downloading and sharing hardcore porn movies” says the BBC, going on
Newsbeat’s found out that people across the UK have been accused of using file-sharing networks to get hold of dozens of adult titles without paying for them.
A German company called DigiProtect claims the users are breaking copyright law and is demanding £500 to settle out of court.
A 20-page legal letter lists the name of the film involved along with the time and date of the alleged download.
Lawyers say they have been contacted by hundreds of worried individuals over the past few weeks.
Many deny copying the movies and say they have no idea why they were identified in the first place.
Typical of the letters
Under UK piracy extortion demand based on evidence from DigiProtect GmbH, “I think this letter is typical of the letters sent out by lawyers in Europe,” said Wikileaks shortly before Christmas, going on, “This is sent to the internet subscriber who had a specific IP address (in this case 86.128.23.216) at a certain time (in this case 11.04.2008 12:14:07).
“Unless the party representing the copyright holder in this case have made a mistake (for example by writing down the wrong IP number), they have seen that the torrent was made available from the IP number at the given time.
“Unfortunately some of the text is cropped, so it is not clear if they tried to download part of the torrent, or all of it.
“According to a letter (in Danish, commented by the Pirate Party of Denmark) from IFPI DK to the danish Ministry of Culture, the technical procedure only involves trying to download a sample from the IP, and if this is the case only a small part of the torrent may have been made available from the IP.”
Gross mistake
And in the middle of it all is the infamous UK lawfirm of Davenport Lyons, beloved by “protection” companies in Europe, and DigiProtect’s legal representatives in Britain.
The company was recently fired by Atari after making a gross mistake by targeting an innocent UK husband-and-wife,
British consumer rights lobby Which? has also filed an official complaint against Davenport Lyons for its, “campaign of letters alleging illegal filesharing,” said The Register.
Sixty-year-old ‘Mary’ from Bedfordshire received a Davenport Lyons DigiProtect letter, says the BBC, quoting her as saying »»»
I’m a pensioner, so it was such a shock. I didn’t even know what a P2P network was before this. I didn’t sleep for a week.
Beckerman would like to know if anyone in the US has been victimised by DigiProtect.
And another interesting question is: has the company been retained in any capacity by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA?
This has additional significance considering the RIAA recently fired MediaSentry, another online scalp hunter with a reputation as dodgy as DigiProtect’s.
‘ … criminal conspiracy to defraud the public’
In the US, what do the companies Davenport Lyons, DigiProtect and Evil Angel have in common?” – asks Amused Cynicism.
Answer?
“They appear to be members of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the public,” says the post, going on »»»
Here`s how it works. Evil Angel, also known as The Evil Empire and John Stagliano Inc, are a California based company making porn films, founded by John Allen Stagliano, a porn movie actor.
Evil Angel contracted with German company DigiProtect for DigiProtect to upload 800 of their films onto P2P networks, including eDonkey, Kazaa and BitTorrent. (A list of titles is here; and translated into English here.)
So far, so legal â it`s perfectly legal for a copyright holder to copy and distribute their works. However, if you read the contract (available here) it`s more sinister than that. Here`s the first two paragraphs:
1. Object of the agreement
LICENSOR is a film maker and a proprietor of the rights of use and enjoymrent and exploitation of pornographic movies. Licensor suffers economic damageas as a result of the illegal exploitation of the movies on so-called peer-2-peer networds. The object of the agreement is the appointment of DigiProtect by licensor to implement suitable measurres to prevent the economic disadvantage licensor is suffereing.2. Granting of rights
To achieve the purpose outlined in clause 1, LICENSOR grants DIGIPROTECT the exclusive right to make the movies listed in Appendix 1 worldwide available to the public via remote computer networks, so-called peer-2-peer and internet file sharing networks such as e-Donkey Kazaa BitTorrent etc. for the duration of this agreement. The parties agree that additional movies can be added to Appendix 1 with a written supplemental agrreement.
So DigiProtect get the films and put them on P2P networks, harvesting the IP addresses of everyone who downloads them. Then they pass on the IP addresses to Davenport Lyons, a UK-based law firm. Davenport Lyons then send threatening letters to members of the public, accusing them of illegal downloading and threatening to sue them unless they pay £500. Davenport Lyons then share the proceeds with DigiProtect. This is looks like fraud to me because:
(i) if the work was put online by the copyright holder for the then any copying is legal
(ii) Davenport Lyons are claiming it was illegal copying
(iii) this is a lie; Davenport Lyons are therefore comitting Fraud under section (2) of the Fraud Act 2006.
Definitely stay tuned
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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January 9th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Things are going exactly the way I had foreseen years ago. If you give the the MAFIAA even one pound of flesh, other industries are going to want in on this litigious money tree. We’re already starting to see publishers starting to complain how the Internet killed their revenue stream. How long will it be before people are sued for infringing on textile patterns, authors finding snippets of text online that resemble something from their book, etc…
Something needs to be done to nip this in the bud. Unfortunately, because this is happening on such a small scale, don’t expect any action from Congress. I’m sure they will be well paid to stay quiet with the few people who will be victimized. What worries me is that here in the US, Obama recently appointed an RIAA scoundrel to be the assistant Attorney General for the US. I hope that this guy won’t be able to push his agenda from his seat. I’m just very disappointed that Obama didn’t take this into consideration before putting him in charge.
Okay I’ll get off my soapbox for now… Thanks for keeping us all informed, Jon!
January 11th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Hi everybody.
Just want to say that I have received a letter from the above mentiond company Digiprotect. They are asking me for £500 British Pounds. They say that I downloaded an Album on P2P Networks. Do I really have to pay these crooks £500 or are they just another set of scammers?
Thanks For Any Information On This Matter
June 25th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Hi Paul:
See http://www.p2pnet.net/story/18541 and http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?company=digiprotect
Cheers!