British Citizens Sued for Downloading Porn on P2P

DavenPort Lyons appears to be at it again.

It may be considered unthinkable that one could get sued for downloading porn, but from the BBC recently suggests otherwise now.

The report says that hundreds of British citizens are being served up with legal threat letters demanding £500 in settlement money or else be taken to court. It may be a familiar scene for those accused of downloading Dream Pinball 3D, but porn? It seems a little bit of a stretch of the imagination until one reads which company is behind the mass litigation: DigiProtect of Davenport Lyon (the same company responsible for the massive litigation of people accused of downloading Dream Pinball 3D)

While a lengthy article, TechDirt notes a key point – that the company who produces the porn is unhappy with the amount being demanded per settlement.

From the BBC article:

“It’s not my understanding that they ask for anything near that. I think the amount was $50 (£34) or €50 (£43),” he said.

“I would be very surprised and I wouldn’t be happy because it would mean it was completely misrepresented to me.”

DigiProtect refused to comment directly for this article.

But in a statement, its legal representatives Davenport Lyons said: “[The £500 settlement fee] consists mainly of the cost of the considerable work required to identify the owner of the IP address.

It might compensate for people being paid £25,000 an hour considering how relatively easy it is to get an IP address from, say, BitTorrent. All one has to do is merely open the torrent file in any popular BitTorrent client and look at the swarm information to get IP addresses. In clients like Shareaza or LimeWire, one can easily get an IP address from the downloads window. So from the looks of things they mean that installing the software and downloading files (an activity millions of online users do every day for free) is considered “considerable work”

Added on top of this is the fact that, the way laws are being legislated, it’s almost encouraging users to steal Wi-Fi because it would be someone else’s IP address being used in the first place.

All of this just re-enforces the thinking that all these file sharing lawsuits are really a means for lawyers to get paid considerable sums of money at the expense of thousands, many of which are potentially innocent the whole time.