DomImus
Posts: 2004
Joined: 3/17/2009
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Arpig
Termy, ya crazy old bugger, P2P is not the way to go. Torrents are.
Torrents are just as bad as P2P if not worse. This following is a post found on another forum regarding legal issues and torrents. It is way long. Hopefully I will not get mod spanked for such a large cut and paste but it is very relevant to the discussion at hand. The material in question here is porn but it could be anything.
***************************************************
Interesting developments in the world of torrents.
The following is a condensed version of a forum discussion.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
:: November 11, 2010 12:53AM
A friend of mine (it really was a friend and not a "friend" i.e. me)
got a letter in the mail today from Steele LLC in chicago about
downloading porn bittorrents. He and I googled it, and found that
there is some legitimacy to the lawsuits, i.e. they were actually
filed. Has anyone else gotten anything like this?
If there are discussions on this already I apologize, I tried
searching but wasn't very successful.
<snip>
:: November 11, 2010 06:06AM
What happened is, he got a letter in the mail in one of the Steele LLC
versus Does 1-100 type lawsuits asking for money. They asked for $2900
dollars before November 18th, and after that it would go up to $7500.
It claimed that if he didn't pay, he would be taken to court etc. etc.
Right now, he is using the PDF from this site, and doing basically
what was said in one of the other threads, replying back with a form
letter, and ignoring the request for payment. He is calling his ISP
legal department tomorrow morning to see if they actually gave out
information to the company via subpoena without asking/telling him
about it, or if the law firm got it from somewhere else.
<snip>
:: January 28, 2011 03:26AM
... He got in touch with me today, by my own fault. He basically did
the scare tactic. Settle for 2900 and avoid paying $5K down the road
after it goes to court. He said they had locations in each state to
take me to court in my own state, so other people must be telling them
to fuck off, they're not in their own state.
I basically told the guy I don't know what he's talking about, I own a
car (worth about $750) and a cell phone, nothing else. So asking for
money is a moot point and he's wasting his time. He asked if I would
have more money in two weeks and I kind of laughed. I said I work ten
hours a week and can barely make enough to pay the cell bill and gas
in my car. He is going to call in two weeks and I'm gonna make an
offer of twenty bucks, lol. But really, I'm just gonna tell him I have
no clue what he's talking about and I'm not paying $2900 for something
I had nothing to do with. If he wants to take me to court in
washington, that's fine. I don't have any money now and I won't then
and that's mostly the truth. I have no assets to speak off and have no
money owed to anyone(debt, cars, computers).
<snip>
:: January 22, 2011 10:21AM
I got the letter as well. Its another one of these law firms trying to
drum up money by scaring people into settling out of court, when the
reality is it isn't even in court yet. They file the initial complaint
against a large number of John Doe's in order to be able to get the
subpeona to find out who had the IP address at the time but the judges
always throw the cases out telling them that they need to go after the
people one by one. It isn't cost effective for them to do this so they
send out these stupid letters to try to scare people. The bottom line
is, if they want to sue you they will have to do it in your locality
and that is going to cost them. They won't get much out of each of
these lawsuits so the likelihood of them actually bringing a suit
against you is very small.
It is all a bunch of garbage. IMO, if the guy calls and does get a
hold of you, do not admit to ANYTHING. Play dumb if you have to.
If he ever calls me I'm going to tell him to go straight to hell.
edit: Just an FYI, this guy has filed a number of these types of cases
against many hundreds of people at once. On another forum I read he
had filed against over a total of 30,000 people so far, though i don't
know exactly where they got that information.
<snip>
:: February 02, 2011 06:48PM
Just got a letter yesterday afternoon from my ISP, Cablevision. Fired
off emails/messages to EFF right now, trying to do research.
Cablevision says they're going to turn over the records Monday unless
they get an order to quash.
Copy of what I sent to EFF:
Quote
Just read on your site about the Texas case your organization was
involved in. Something similar was just dropped on my lap last night
and I was hoping that you could help me or point me in the right
direction on whom to talk to.
Yesterday afternoon, Fedex left an envelope at my door from my
internet provider, Cablevision (CSC Holdings, LLC). They were served
with a subpoena last October with an order to produce IP address
information (which apparently involves me) to Future Blue, Inc., whom
is represented by Steele Law Firm, LLC of Chicago. This order came
through the US District Court for Northern Illinois.
And they plan to hand over the records on Monday, February 7th, if I
do not produce notice to them that the motion has been quashed. This
obviously doesn't give me much in the way of time to do anything about
this.
.....
<snip>
:: February 07, 2011 07:18PM
Well, it looks like something happened that will be significantly
increasing the amount of mail sent out by these "lawyers". I foresee
many more people getting hit with these, since it looks like the
people now mentioning it are former PTnA/EMP members. So, I am
thinking that the BS about how they (PTnA/EMP) were going to frag
their hard drives is probably bunk.
Doubt it's coming from PTnA. Most likely (as others have said), they
added the torrent and just wrote down the IP addresses of everyone who
was seeding. From the subpoena that I got, it was just asking for
things like:
"Who had the IP address of 67.80.160.37 at 2010-09-21 03:04:56 PM"
"Who has the IP address of 69.125.147.153 at 2010-09-21 06:21:18 PM"
All the dates in the subpoena that I got were from 9/19 to 9/26.
<snip>
:: February 10, 2011 05:33PM
I received a letter last week from my ISP. They don't tell me what I'm
accused of downloading, only that Steel has subpoenaed them to get my
identity. From what I've read so far in different blogs, the ISP
releases your identity, and then the lawyer tries to shake you down,
offering you a settlement, but threatening to sue if you don't settle.
I could be wrong, but according to what I've read, these firms are all
just in the shakedown stage right now. I'm really interested to see if
anybody actually gets named in a lawsuit. And as a downloader of a lot
of porn, and as somebody who hasn't used anything to make myself
anonymous using torrents, I'm wondering if I'll be getting anymore of
these letters.
<snip>
:: February 23, 2011 07:47AM
I just got one of these too. Mine wasn't puretna it was an empornium
file.
Here's a quick summary of it:
The letter lists my name/address
It says the lawsuit hasn't started yet and will only start when they
serve a complaint which they'll do if settlement efforts fail
There's a nice long paragraph of horror stories of people who have
been fined 250k+ for piracy.
Then they say I have 14 days from the day the letter was dated to
settle for $2900.
Next it says I'll be committing a felony (destruction of evidence) if
I erase the file from my computer.
Last it says I should speak to an attorney to review my rights,
because their interests are the exact opposite of my well being.
After that there's a page showing the information they got from my
isp, listing the date/time I was running the torrent and my ip/contact
information.
The whole thing ends with some frequently asked questions such as what
are the benefits of settling, will I remain anonymous, and a whole
bunch of questions where the answer is pay us and everything will be
better.
They've also called me once so far, which is actually how I found out
about it since mail delivery is slow here. The phone call basically
consisted of them trying to convince me to pay the $2900 now in order
to avoid a more expensive settlement/lawsuit later.
So far, I have yet to receive anything from my isp as well. My
instinct is that if this had the potential to be any serious copyright
issue, my isp would have sent me a letter and disconnected my service.
The various articles and threads I've read on it have seemed to imply
that it's nothing major as well. As far as I can tell the standard
response is to demand $2900, then demand $7500, and then do nothing.
<snip>
:: February 24, 2011 05:53AM
Even in civil violations, isp's almost always send a cease and desist
letter when there's a claim of copyright infringement. As far as I can
tell, people aren't getting them from their isp's with these letters
from Steele.
Those letter come when all they want your isp to do is stop the
torrent. Many times copywrite holders will send courtesy letters with
ip numbers asking that the sharing simply stop. Those get handled with
a reverse lookup and an email or letter to you to cease and desist.
In this case Steele doesn't care if you stop or not, they have you
locked in their sights. If they gave your isp a court issued search
warrant for the information, they are not required to notify you at
all. In fact warrant may force them to not reveal to you that any
information is being gathered. It depends on the filing and the
information they convince the judge they can have.
The fine print of the service agreement you get when you sign up with
your isp will probably state that they will comply with court issued
requests for information. The current federal law dealing with
personal info makes it a crime from any utility to reveal person data
about you and not handing over the data with proper legal request for
your person info is also a crime. Steele has the law on his side right
now.
At this point it is time to find some legal help. I think the only
defense you have is either proving that you didn't download the file
in question (very hard to do), or try to drag this out far enough so
Steele looses interest in the case (not very likely).
Locked in their sights or not, I'm still not doing anything about it.
Several of their cases have been dismissed already without going to
court, I see nothing exceptional in mine to suggest it would be, it's
just another typical 300 john does like his other 10+ cases. Infact,
comparing the motions filed on RFC the exact same things are happening
that happened in the previous cases (which are still going through the
motions or have already been terminated). I expect that in a few days
I'll get a second letter saying my options are to either settle for a
now increased fee of $7500 or to goto court over it. There's no point
in doing anything until I get a court summons, in which case there's
still little point in me doing anything as the very worst that could
happen to me is I get a judgment filed against me for money I don't
have. Good luck collecting in that case, and even then assuming I did
have the money... it would most likely be significantly less than
$3000
Their whole business revolves around scaring people into settling.
They don't want these to goto trial, because then they would lose the
ability to continue filing these lawsuits if they lose the case, and
the costs of going to court are higher than they can reasonably hope
to collect from each person. If I do get a summons though, it will be
time to lawyer up, just to be safe. Until then it's all a bunch of hot
air in my opinion.
<snip>
:: March 06, 2011 01:04PM
... I'm involved in one of these suits, and I've been posting updates
there. They had a case dismissed this past week, and they called me,
offering the same settlement terms, then told me they are prepared to
go forward with individual suits and reminded me my identity has not
yet been disclosed. They have filed a voluntary dismissal, which I
think means the judge hasn't made a ruling, so they can press
individual suits in a different circuit. They are also saying they
have lawyers all over the country ready to go to work.
They did identify a file they claim I downloaded: jayden01.avi. I have
been trying to find it online for free to maybe put a hole in their
case, but I haven't yet. If anyone has it or knows where to get it for
free, let me know via either thread or pm? Thanks.
It was a voluntary dismissal of "certain defendants", i.e. people who
sent him money. The case is still ongoing.
<snip>
:: March 06, 2011 08:23PM
I'm talking to an EEF lawyer from my home state right now. Hopefully I
can get this over with by paying him the least amount of money as
possible. I have heard a few people were able to have all charges
dropped while others having to only pay around the $1500 range. Either
way, from what I have been reading, the sooner you get to this the
better your chances are getting an easier settlement. AS much as it
kills me to have to settle with this twat, I really don't have the
time to fight legal battles over pornography.
|
What if I switched sides ? (P2P and other related, and ... - 
Profile
you seem to have well above average tech chops and pc skills. I promise that if you would take an evening and research and learn about Usenet and newsreader software and nzb files you will never ever again go back to P2P or torrents. Ever. 
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