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Originally Posted by TheDaddy
Because there are avenues to exhaust before it goes to court which is what Photodude has been saying all along, deal with Davenport Lyons correctly and it won't get anywhere near.
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Yep, lots of ways to prove your not in the wrong, and you need to put these to Davenport Lyons.
I never got to court with Microsoft, they backed down long before it got to that stage. It took me about 8 weeks of communicating with their anit-piracy/legal team, and sending them discs to prove they were genuine, before they admitted they had no case.
In the orders used to get the account holders details, the judge makes some statements that point to their being no proof of copyrights breach, just a possibility of it happening. I've marked these in bold below:
Quote:
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AND UPON reading the documents marked in the Court file as having been read and it appearing that there is a prima facie case that each of the subscribers associated with the IP addresses listed in Schedule 1 to this Order have copied the Applicant's work(s) on to his or her personal or office Computer (the "Work(s)") without the Applicant's permission for the purpose of making it available via file sharing Websites for third parties to download, which may give rise to a claim for Copyright infringement;
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Note that the only statement of fact where the judge has said there is a "prima facie" case, is underlined. In "propper inglish"
that means that on seeing their side of the evidence only, there could be a
possibility of a copyrights breach. So he ordered the ISP's to release details to Davenport Lyons (as he is bound to do so by the data protection laws, that release data for the purpose legal proceedings), so they could then legally pursue the
possible copyrights breach.
What Davenport Lyons then did with all this data, is send out 1000's of letters asking people to admit to a copyrights breach, and pay them a fee. They knew full well that they had no physical proof of who committed the breach, or if a breach had occurred. But by doing it this way, they knew they would get some money out of it.
Those who they guessed wouldn't reply or attend court, were taken forward, and got default judgements against them. They did that to try and create a benchmark ruling for them to refer to. But as many have pointed out, there is no benchmark, because those few cases were not defended.
So, don't throw them in the bin, just send it back denying the claim and requesting proof you have "shared" or "distributed" this game (or what ever).
