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Atari sent me a letter today. I am being charged £560 for torrenting a personal backup of the game Test Drive Unlimited.


markhimself

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They sent me a letter with details so exact even down to the fact i used UTorrent 1.76

BPI, Virgin Media and Atari suck. I torrented it over a year ago.

I thought Virgin Media give u warnings?

mabey not.

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FTW. Shred it.

AN IP does not link a crime to a person.

Indeed, it's very hard to produce evidence to secure a prosecution. Even if they did take you to court you can question everything and make them bring in experts, making it so expensive it's not worth them bothering. I'd look into Privacy Laws and Data Protection Laws if anything develops from it as I'm sure questions could be raised about the legality of the collection of any so called evidence.

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My IP changes on a Regular Basis (restarting router) and I assume someone else gets the IP I had, so what if its them. An IP isnt enough to link someone to a crime, it can lead them to an ISP and an Exchange. Also, what if you have a wireless network? Someone could have been using it ;-)

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My IP changes on a Regular Basis (restarting router) and I assume someone else gets the IP I had, so what if its them. An IP isnt enough to link someone to a crime, it can lead them to an ISP and an Exchange. Also, what if you have a wireless network? Someone could have been using it ;-)

ISP supposedly log who gets which IP address. How reliable can these logs be when ISP's have tens of thousands of customers? In theory computers don't make mistakes, in practice they fucking do.

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ISP supposedly log who gets which IP address. How reliable can these logs be when ISP's have tens of thousands of customers? In theory computers don't make mistakes, in practice they fucking do.

Agree.

Most home users will have a Dynamic IP, the mere fact that your IP can change from one second to another is a good starting point in a legal defence.

Having said that, I'd imagine that some if not most ISPs will record which line has which IP at which time, meaning they could see for example:

From 1.30AM - 2.30AM on 1/1/07 IP '1.1.1.1' was downloading from 'illigitimate' sources.

& from 1AM - 3AM on 1/1/07 IP '1.1.1.1' was leased to <you>.

I guess it depends on what they've got on you in terms of evidece, for which I doubt they'd reveal out-of-court.

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You need to be specific about what they are charging you for. They cannot just send you a bill for the software, since thats just extortion. Without revealing to much personal info would it be possible to copy the text of the letter up here verbatim? While it must be said that no one who posts here is a lawyer it would be useful to see the wording of the letter. Are they taking you to court to recover damages? They also have to prove it was you, its on them to do this, its not a case of you having to prove that you didn't. If it comes down to search warrents, run dban on your disks and install something like plan9 as your OS.

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Also buy at least two 100 DVD spindles, open them, and scatter them every where. Label a couple of them and but some files on a few. Make it so expensive to examine all your storage it's would cost them at least 10 times as much as they would possibly win from you, when they 'request' it, make sure to point out that you may have hidden stuff in the middle of the disks. Hopefully causing them to do entire disk scans, which would take at least 20 minuets to do on a normal DVD-ROM drive for each disk.

Also, after DBAN'ing, if you can do without it, damage the circuit boards on the hard disks.

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IP address alone isn't enough, but most ISP's ask or record your MAC address of your Modem, PC, or Routers, so they woudl be able to identify your hardware to your account. Without being able to positively identify the hardware, they would have to use other methods of identification, which could be considered circumstantial if it doesn't idendtify you by email, online handle/nickname, pc-name, etc.

Remove ALL your hardware that can be identified by MAC addressing, and any physical evidence there in. Deny, deny, deny. Get a good lawyer, as this most likely isn't going to be going away.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=ga...sa=N&tab=wn

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yeah because it's imposable to change a mac address

Well, it is at least on something like your cable modem. Routers let you clone MAC addresses, and wireless cards let you manually change it while windows and linux can do it by way of software, but if your ISP (Like mine) requires registration of your cable modem to get access to their network, then they have you right there.

I doubt he has been spoofing his MAC all this time anyway, Not that it isn't a good idea though.

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OK. i think ill pass the 200 disks and the lowyar thing, as paying 560£ may just be easier.

Paying just makes you guilty(which you are anyway), but be careful how you deal with this, If you end up in court, that amount will be nothing compared to a copyright conviction.

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Paying just makes you guilty(which you are anyway), but be careful how you deal with this, If you end up in court, that amount will be nothing compared to a copyright conviction.

It's unlikely they would get any money out of him as he can show his income being little to nothing and likely pay no more than a few hundred pounds (if they won) and that would be payments of a few pounds a week. By giving in, it makes them think they can win and make money out of going after people. If you do not fight for your rights, what's the point of having any, you may as well live in North Korea.

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