Court Orders Expert Opinion in P2P Leecher Mod Case
A women received a demand for 700 euros after an anti-piracy company claimed she had shared pornographic material on the Internet. However, she was using a so-called ‘leecher mod’, which means her P2P client never uploaded anything. Now a court is calling for an expert witness to dissect the supposed evidence against her.
In 2008, a German woman was wrongfully accused of distributing a pornographic movie via eD2K. She was using eMule in conjunction with what is commonly known as a ‘leecher mod’ – an addon to file-sharing software which stops the client from uploading material back to the Internet.
Using a mod like this means that no offense of distribution could have been carried out. Indeed, as we pointed out in our earlier report, the stats from her client showed no evidence of uploading, despite an uptime of 924 days.
The lawyers who sent the cease and desist (and a demand for 700 euros) didn’t withdraw the claims after she protested her innocence, so she took advice, went to court and filed suit against the rightsholder.
Unfortunately the judge in the case has no idea about IT issues and wants to have an independent witness examine the software used by anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector. Experts don’t come cheap and this one is set to cost 5,000 euros.
This is believed to be the first time that a neutral expert witness has had the opportunity to examine the software of an anti-piracy company in Germany. So, together with filesharing lawyer Dr. Wachs, Verein gegen den Abmahnwahn e.V and Initiative Abmahnwahn-Dreipage, our friends at news site Gulli have started a donation drive to raise the funds.
Lawyer Dr. Wachs has kindly given the woman 3,000 euros towards the expert but a further 2,000 must be raised via donations. Hopefully this amount can be achieved as engaging the skills of the expert witness will provide a golden opportunity to see exactly how these systems operate and have their shortcoming revealed in court.
Anyone wishing to contribute can do so here (bank details at bottom of article)
