The letter makes reference to sections of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It seems that they have embellished on what the Act actually says to add more crap-your-pants factor to the letter.
The problem I have with what DL have written (please be aware I am not a lawyer but have south some legal advice) is firstly how they have interpreted sections of the Act and secondly the inclusion of words in brackets which do not appear anywhere in the Act. In fact there is a section of the Act that contradicts their interpretation.
Please excuse my vagueness. I’d love to publicly challenge their arguments but I would be very surprised if DL aren’t monitoring these discussions regarding their ‘work’ in order to mask the gaping holes in the next batch of letters. It would appear from earlier letters I’ve seen they are now covering a lot more ground.

If law states it is the responsibility of the internet subscriber to secure the wireless network and they are liable for the wrong doing of others through that service (in the cases of network hijacking etc.) why is free public wi-fi so readily available? Have corporations such as Starbucks not done their homework? Is local government flouting the law by making the internet freely available in public libraries? I’d say unlikely.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is without DL knowing who actually carried out these alleged acts (as opposed to who subscribes to the internet service) how can they bring a case to court?

The lawsuit was based on evidence obtained by the swiss Anti-piracy outlet Logistep, which provided rights holders with the IP address of the defendant. A law office working for the rights holder used the IP address to start a criminal complaint. Prosecutors requested the name of the defendant from a major German ISP and shared it with rights holders, who then started another civil lawsuit against the defendant – a controversial but common practice in Germany that has led to tens of thousands of lawsuits as well as completely overwhelmed prosecutors.

The court now found that the ISP wasn’t allowed to give out the name of the defendant because file sharing doesn’t count as a serious criminal offense. Handing over the name and address of the defendant violated his constitutional right to privacy. There is no common law in Germany, so this decision won’t immediately affect other pending file sharing lawsuits, but it’s quite possible that other defendants will get inspired by this decision to also try their luck in court, and that sooner or later we’ll see one of those cases in front of the German Supreme Court.

I don’t know what to do now, do I bury my head in the sand or pay the £758.72 which they are requesting

any advice will be appreciated

But keep the advice coming its always welcomed :D

I’m trying to stay calm, but am reading more and more reports telling people to reply to the letters. If you dont then they can get a default win against you without you even having to go to court because it’s a civil case and not a criminal.

Not too sure what to do about it to be honest. My biggest concern is that they win by default, sell the debt to a collection agency who then send some thugs round to take the the TV…

if you search google on the company DL used (Logistep) and their court cases you’ll see they’ve not been too successful :)

Legal firm Davenport Lyons sent the demand to one PC Pro reader, after claiming it had “forensic computer analysis” that shows he downloaded the game Two Worlds using BitTorrent. Davenport Lyons is acting on the behalf of German games distributor Zuxxez, which last year employed the firm to target file sharers.

The PC Pro reader was given no prior warning to stop file sharing, unlike the usual “three strikes and you’re out” approach adopted by the music industry, which gives users two warnings to stop sharing before legal proceedings are instigated.

The legal demand claims that “given the extent of the damage that file sharing is causing to our client’s business, our client is left with no option but to adopt a policy of enforcing its rights in an attempt to stem the wholesale misappropriation of its property.”

The letter goes on to claim that its “client is prepared to give you the opportunity to avoid legal action” provided it receives compensation of �600 plus �8.18 to cover the costs of obtaining the user’s details from their ISP.

The letter insists payment must be made within 14 days or else “our client will be seeking as a minimum from you an interim payment of �1,200 and will request the Court to determine the level of total damages and costs which should be awarded against you”.

Wrong postage paid

The PC Pro reader, who has asked not be to named, says he can find no trace of the Two Worlds game he is alleged to have downloaded on his home PCs, although can’t rule out the possibility that his teenage children

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may have downloaded the game.

Nevertheless, he feels the �600 “settlement” is “highly disproportionate” for the download of a single game.

“To add insult to injury it [Davenport Lyons] didn’t pay enough postage on the letter and I had to collect it from the sorting office at a cost of �1.30,” he says. “This also used up most of the two weeks that it allowed for a response.”

A spokesman for Davenport Lyons told PC Pro that it was investigating why the letter was sent out with the incorrect postage, but refused to comment further on the matter. The game’s distributor Zuxxez was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

Hundreds targeted

This isn’t the first time Davenport Lyons has targeted British file sharers. The firm last year sent out hundreds of similar letters on behalf of Zuxxez for the game Dream Pinball 3D and Codemasters for Colin McRae Dirt.

Many of those targeted claim they didn’t download the game they were accused of illegally sharing, according to multiple posts on internet forums.

Several of those have challenged Davenport Lyons to produce their “forensic” evidence in court, although we can find no reported cases of successful prosecutions.

We have just released my debut album as a FREE HQ Mp3 download.

It was a tough decision for us to make because of the vast amounts spent on the album. We had two of the biggest record producers in the world work on it…. at Peter Gabriel’s Realworld studio and at Abbey Road studio in london.

Despite all that, we recognise the massive potential the internet and free albums in particular offers. We launched last friday and have already had 1000′s of DL’s all over the world.

Come over and download for FREE.. it takes 2 minutes to DL because we have a dedicated server.

http://www.jackrubinacci.com
Thanks
Jack

Their response, assuming current copyright law, was along the lines of the IP/copyright owner would only be entitled to claim the value of their actual loss plus nominal costs. Say the retail cost of a game is £30, the retailer and distributor will take margin, the actual value to the publisher will vary but will only be between £10-20. This is the maximum they can claim from you in an English court. The value of their costs are limited as well, the two IP lawyers said the maximum you would have to pay would be around £100.

This is why DL have not taken anyone to court. Their letters are a complete scaremongering scam. My Solicitor friend’s professional advice was to ignore the letter completely

Surely if they know that this file is out there and are just waiting for people to ‘commit a crime’ then that isn’t legally unacceptable?

A mate of mine got the same letter last week – but he’s probably going to pay up because he doesn’t want to end up in court.

rofl

Got a reply after pointing out that their “evidence” is flawed
“it has come to our attention that your letter recieved contained an error to the number of hits (not their exact words) now claiming for one hit and reducing the extortion by £132.92!!!!! After reading threads on other sites it seems they have sent out this second letter out to EVERYONE regardless of how many “hits” they say you had in the first “gun to the head” letter.
Yet another example of of them sending out blanket letters hoping someone will pay up they actually had the bloody cheek to “apologise for the inconvenience caused”

Keep the faith brothers and dont pay up (but keep listening to soul)
)

just got another letting saying pay up within 7 days or your going to court.

now id love to get in contact with the 500 people fighting back as id love to be a part of that

My ISP is Virgin and even though I don’t have a wireless router at home but a normal one, I live in a sharehouse and several rooms are connected, with tenants coming and going and their friends vising, therefore I have no chance of knowing who and how uses the broadband.

According to the posts in this forum, there’s no UK law sying that the line owner is responsible for its usage, but I’d still prefer to hear this from an expert, a solicitor, which I believe isn’t the case of the posters here.

My mail is storm2@centrum.cz, if Matt managed to gather the involved victims.

1) They state that they have downloaded a working copy of the software from you. – By the nature of Bittorrent, this is difficult if not impossible to prove, as client a ‘exchanges’ small sections of the file with client b, however as far as i know, no client logs which parts were received from which client, and whether the data received was good or bad data, so all they can really show is that your IP and their IP met on the designated port and did a handshake, and possibly sent them some data which is meaningless on its own.

I won’t even go into how long it would take for you to send them a fully working copy of the game over bittorrent, all you’ll have sent them in most cases are a few blocks which could quite easily have the same binary data in them as a jpg or mp3, and the only thing making them into the file they’re supposed to be, is their link to other blocks, which would have been received from different IP’s and therefore cannot be linked to you.

2) As I said in point 1, all that can be proved is that you’ve done a handshake with their IP and possibly sent some relatively meaningless file blocks, but those meaningless file blocks are being provided to you by the copyright holder, and you’re sending them to the copyright holder, so where in there is the copyright violation? By using Bittorrent to trace downloaders, they are willingly uploading their own file to you, and since they’ve stated in their letter that they know exactly how the bittorrent protocol works, they would have trouble in court as they have made their software available to download for free over bittorrent, voiding their copyright, and you sending them their own data back is not breaching copyright either.

3) If number 2 doesn’t stick then you’ve got them on entrapment. Before mounting a ‘sting’ operation like this would be, i believe that the Police have to be informed and have to authorise the operation, otherwise any evidence is inadmissable in court.

Surely both software items having the same date in these matters is very unlikely (can anyone check ?) and as such if one is a wrong date, then ‘half’ of the claim letters are invalid and will be again laughed out of court.

Reading earlier thread correspondence, it appears a no-cd crack was needed to run the chap. Thus whilst the Work may be present as an image, the Work itself does not execute fully. Hence the supporting information for the claim is incorrect and will itself be laughed out of court.

Hence Davenport either /a/ obtained the High Court Order in a fraudulent manner, or /b/ are deviating from the scope of the High Court Order … in any case the claim letter is thus a false claim.

I got all worried about it, only managed to read a few paragraphs before panicking. Then I calmed down sat and read

it a bit more..

@post
I found one bit on my letter under “Unlawful Act and Consequences” (paragraph 2 & 3)which says:

“For making it available via your internet connection on peer-to-peer network(s), either through your own acts or

by permitting others (knowlingly or otherwise) to do so, for third parties on the same networks to download…

…making the Work available can be caused by a person being connected to your internet connection and downloading

the Work, during the course of which the part downloaded is then made available to other third parties connected to

the P2P network in question.”

Does anyone else have this in their letters from DL?

As far as know I have not downloaded the game Two Worlds and suspect that someone must have piggy-backed on my

connection to download it, which means that I haven’t “permitted” them to do so. As it is not a crime to have an

unsecure wireless router I haven’t done anything wrong.

@47 (Matt) Have you created an online forum or something that we can all sign up to yet? Let me know I’ll

definitely join, these letters are nothing but bullying and a way to get compensation for a game that hasn’t got very good reviews.

I am in the same position as everyone else as I also have a router that wasn’t secured. Thats the only way I can see this happening on my ip address IF THEY EVEN HAVE THE RIGHT ONE!!

my email is davidpauloconnor@googlemail.com So drop me an email & lets stop this shite NOW.

the advice given to me was to ignore it
lets hope thats the right option…
i do have the legitimate game too

i think its was to do with the snotty e-mail i sent to them telling them that the game sucked and was going back to blizzards world of warcraft

but is ignoring this letter is the wrong thing to do then i will pop into the local Internet cafe telling every1 how long i will be spending in jail ^.^