12,000 German Filesharers to be Sued in 2007
Written by Ernesto on December 28, 2006The IFPI announced that they will sue at least 1000 people per month in the upcoming year. These yet to be identified pirates will face fines between 2,000 and 15,000 Euro.
Peter Zombik, CEO of the German IFPI said that they will drastically increase the number of lawsuits against filesharers in 2007. They started their war on music piracy in the beginning of 2004, and have sued 20,000 people up until today. Zombik estimated that they will take at least 1000 pirates to court every month in the upcoming year, an increase of 20% over this year.
P2P traffic, especially BitTorrent related traffic, is still on the rise in Germany. A recent study conducted by Ipoque found that P2P traffic accounts for 30% of the total Internet traffic in Germany during the daytime, and 70% at night.
The IFPI will have a hard time tracing the IP addresses back to the filesharers, especially because the higher federal court in Germany has ruled that ISPs are not allowed to keep IP-logs without a legal reason (billing for example). This means that users with a dynamic IP address cannot be tracked down if their IP address has changed.
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For me it the IFPI guy´s name very funny - in Slovak it means “little zombie”. Nomen omen…
How can the music undustry possibly win a case against P2P users in Germany?
In the US, the DMCA law stipulates mandatory damages for copyright infringement, from $750 to $150,000 per infringement depending on circumstances, and through this draconian extortion law, they can force any P2P user to pay them a fortune without having to show that they lost even a single penny.
In any “normal” civil lawsuit, the plaintiff must show an actual, verifiable loss to be awarded dameges by the court.
Since there is no proof that an illegal download equates to a lost sale, the music industry will have a hard time proving their case in any court outside the US that an individual file sharer has personally cost them thousands of dollars in lost profit. Unless Germany has a DMCA-like statutory-damages law, any lawsuit against an ordinary P2P user will likely be an uphill court battle.
IIRC last time I checked the german Copyrightlaw (UrhG) it has no statuatory- damages clause.
So it’s like you said “In any “normal” civil lawsuit, the plaintiff must show an actual, verifiable loss to be awarded dameges[sic] by the court.”
So what this guy is doing here is called “Säbelrasseln” in german.
Please note however that due to the legal situation right now in germany the MAFIAA must file a criminal complained with the authorities first to even get the Names and Addresses of those they want to extort money from. So the more serious problem german copyrightinfringers can face is that the police will confiscate all their technical equippment and a criminal court of law might fine or theoreticly send him to prison for violations of copyright law.
Btw. thanks to the MAFIAA lobby the maximum jail sentence time for some forms of sexual harrasment are lower now then for sharing music.
(do not interpret the last paragraph as an invitation to visit Peter Zombik instead of listening to music) ;-)
In other words,if i downloading a movie file via torrent-utorrent,pirate bay,mininova-…etc.,will i be punished by IFPI???
yes you will, you will….
what about using a different type of sharing system, like dc++? can this be tracked too? are users of other systems being sued?
The guys at anti-piracy organizations simply deserves death.
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