Davenport Lyons

[Justin]

Thats a very nice letter

[stephenc]

Wow, a £18,437 bill from one ISP for the names of the people on the list from DL. There are 18 ISPs on the list in total.

[aos101]

Arrgghh! I hate it when legal things like this contain technical errors . In the document linked by Ferret42 above, page 27 (a letter from Davenport Lyons to Telewest) incorrectly says their customers have been uploading the game to websites. The whole idea of P2P applications is no central server needs to hold the file (so no webserver). At most hashes of the file might be on a webserver, but not the file itself.

Also the first sentence of their explanation of their file sharing monitor program contains an error. It talks about finding computers on the WWW (world wide web) that are making the game available, but P2P networks are not the world wide web. The world wide web is all the webpages available over HTTP that are interlinked through the use of hyperlinks. P2P software works on top of the Internet, but not the WWW.

I wish they would run these letters by someone who understands the concepts of P2P, Internet and WWW before they send them out. It just stinks when they are trying to provide technical evidence to bring someone to court, and they don't even understand the most basic concepts.

[kevt]

Matthew

I had the same letter.I replied denying it as the computer where off at the, now they want to inspect my computers.

Does anybody know of a user group we can hire a lawyer as a group tp fight this

Kevin

[aos101]

I love this bit on page3 of the document Ferret42 linked to:

As you will be aware from our original letter, making a copyright work available to other users on the internet is an offence under sections 16(1)(d) and 20 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

That is complete crap. If that were true, the internet just would not exist in it's current form, and releasing most open source software (and everything else where someone owns the copyright) would be an offence.

Making a copyright work available to other users when you do not have permission to do so might be an offence, but what they say is just plain stupid, especially from a law firm who you'd expect to understand these things. I hope their submissions to a court are a bit better than the letters they send out

[segedunum]

While I won't comment on all of the ridiculous tripe in that document (wow, let's translate techno babble into legal speak), it is clear that they are using the Norwich Pharmcal court order, the terms of which should prohibit monetary gain from a threat in the manner that they are so obviously doing there.

The bill from Telewest is also rather funny. > £18,000 to get some information which should take a few minutes? It would be interesting to see if ISPs have been cooperating without a court order (Data Protection Act issues), and it is interesting to see from that document that ISPs can simply sign on the line so they don't have to turn up to any hearing.

Their method for gathering the data that they are using for this is also shockingly flawed:

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/uwcse_dmca_tr.pdf

I have no problem with having a go at people who use their own bandwidth to upload and download lots of copyrighted materials, but if you are going to try and put an identity to the address you need to be sure of your methodology and actually know what you're talking about. The methodology here looks like yet more amateurish junk produced by some company somewhere who promises the entertainment industry "Hey, we can find these dastardly people". It's rather like the companies who claim they can protect CDs and DVDs by crippling them. The document sent by DL simply paints right over this and makes an assumption that the methodology is infallible.