I had a battle with microsoft a while ago over breaching their copyrights and intellectual property rights, by selling their stuff on Ebay (100's of their CD's). They went to town on me with threats of court action etc and fines in the thousands. Everybody told me to drop it, as they were the "big boys" and knew what they were doing. But who won at the end of the day?????????
ME
And I've had god knows how many sellers asking me how I can sell these without Ebay removing them, or MS Vero UK fining me. It's simple really, learn your rights, and then use them.
Quote:
Dear Mr XXXXXXX
Thank you for the additional information you provided regarding your eBay auctions, in which you were offering HP restore media. After further review, we have contacted eBay and notified them that Microsoft has no objection to the reinstatement of your auctions. Thank you very much for your patience and cooperation throughout the resolution of this matter. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused by the suspension of your auction.
Sincerely,
Scott
MS UK NetSafe Team
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Yep, that's Microsoft apologising to some little man in west Yorkshire, because they thought they were better than me
.
Do your homework on the subjects needed to defend yourself. You need exact details on exactly how you have breached copyrights. Unless you have directly uploaded this whole game (or what ever) to one or more persons, you have not distributed the whole game, just a small portion of it in the form of a data packet. They also need to prove who you have distributed it to, in the form of actual people (not just other IP's). As it's a civil case, the weight of proof needed for them to win isn't as high as that needed in a criminal court. BUT there still has to be proof of physical distribution of the whole game, for them to lay claim to you distributing their product (that means the whole game). The exception is if their claim states "a whole or part" of their copyrights protected material. Then they would need to show what parts you distributed, or how much of their data you sent over. You see, some parts of their product will not be covered by copyrights, and that may have been the part distributed in your data packets.
Example: This forum software is covered by copyrights, but some of the codes (php html etc) used in it's layouts etc are not. It's only when you copy the whole software package, that you then breach copyrights.
Think about it. Have you uploaded the whole game to one or more persons, or just little bit's of it to many
PS: They also need to prove that you and the person downloading it from you, did not have a genuine copy of said product.