Atari drops harsh fight against illegal filesharers
Multiple firms have started cracking down more harshly on people they suspect of illegally sharing, especially in the UK. But some of these firms seem to be operating a very harsh and unfair system of weeding out lawbreakers. Thankfully, longtime computer games developer Atari has seen the light.
Atari, along with other companies, employed London-based law firm Davenport Lyons to go after suspected file-sharers. Anyone who the company suspected of sharing Atari property over the Internet via torrents and the like were sent threatening letters demanding £500 ($770).
Davenport Lyons has had some success with this method, securing a £16,000 ($24,600) award for damages on behalf of Topware Interactive in the summer. An unnamed woman was fined the huge amount of money for allegedly uploading Dream Pinball 3D to the Internet, where it was shared on P2P sites.
But the Atari letters that followed didn’t always get the desired results. In October, it was reported that a Scottish couple who had never played a compute game in their lives were accused of illegally sharing Race 07 on their computer.
Rather than admit to something they were sure they hadn’t done, they contacted consumer group, Which? and the case was dropped. But the incident begged the question as to how many other accused people had just simply paid up rather than risk a day in court and a much higher legal bill.
The problem comes because of the system davenport Lyons uses to gather its data on potential copyright infringers. A Swiss firm called Logistep collects IP addresses of computers found to be using BitTorrent to share copyrighted files. The names and addresses of the people running the computers with these IPs is then obtained from ISPs via court order. But it seems to ignore the fact that Wi-Fi connections can easily be hacked into, meaning an IP address is hardly ultimate proof of guilt. Hence the over-the-top threatening legal letters.
Thankfully, according to The Register, Atari has called off the dogs, and no longer uses Davenport Lyons to chase alleged copyright offenders. And I don’t blame Atari because this sledgehammer method of protecting your intellectual property doesn’t do any good in real terms, and is just about as bad PR as you could possibly hope to get.
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