Just thought I’d share a comment on this Guardian article that quoted a 1971 case against Private Eye and their response to a somewhat lawyer’s letter:

In the case of Arkell v. Pressdram (1971), the plaintiff was the subject of an article relating to illicit payments, and the magazine (Private Eye) had ample evidence to back up the article.[26] Arkell’s lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: “His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.” The magazine responded: “We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: **** off.”

Made me chuckle…

Arkell vs Pressdram crops up semi-regularly on here. (-:

Having read the article now, I’d say that response is wholly appropriate.

Useful link in the comments there for anyone who does get a shitogram demanding money.

https://acsbore.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/115443516-the-speculative-invoicing-handbook-second-edition.pdf

I wonder how much they paid a “forensic computer analyst” who hasn’t heard of DHCP.

I wonder how much they paid a “forensic computer analyst” who hasn’t heard of DHCP.

Doesn’t matter. It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care. This is how it works:

Invoicing company: “Hey Sky, here’s a court order for you to give us a list of customers matching these IPs.”

Sky: “Oh, ok, here.”

Invoicing company: *mailmerge*

A percentage of Sky customers: “Oh crap, I’d better pay up!”

The worrying thing in all this is, having read up on it a bit now, the chances are that the company approached Sky and asked “if we give you a court order, will you put up a fight?” If Sky had answered “yes” they’d have gone and tormented someone else. That’s a nasty precedence to be setting; BT was burned by this a few years back and decided to say “no” next time.

A percentage of Sky customers: “Oh crap, I’d better pay up!”

Plus the PR from it probably deters some people from torrenting (for a while).

“Making an example of people” has precedence, sure.

But this isn’t about piracy, companies are buying cheap rights to films expressly to go after people who are sharing them.

Kind of like the patent trolls then.

We got a letter from one of the patent trolls at work, which was a worry until we checked and found that what we do (and they were claiming infringed on their bought patent) predated the patent by several years…

Ooh, did you sue them for breach of patent?

Nah, we don’t have one, as that would mean telling everyone how we do it so they could find clever ways to copy us without infringing. We pointed out our prior use and they went back under their bridge.