Notice of Copyright Infringement

Has anyone here ever gotten a notice of copyright infringement, before? I got an email from Charter, last night, and I'm kind of panicking. It doesn't really help that I've found conflicting advice, when googling for things about copyright infringement notices. Most of them say to just ignore the notices, and that you'll be fine, but a few, which seem to be more reputable, say that doing so is a big risk, and just accepting any settlement, or consulting with a lawyer, is a better choice than ignoring the notices.

In the hypothetical situation that I did illegally download something (which I'm not saying I did), does anyone have any advice?

 

Yeah I got the same from my service provider and I'm pretty worried.

 

It depends on your countries laws and what the download in question is, but generally I believe it's not worth their while to take individual pirates to court. If they really wanted to take you down the police would have arrived at your door with a court order to seize your computer as evidence.

What kind of notice is this exactly? If it's just 'we totes detected you did something bad' that's probably empty intimidation, as actually getting their 'evidence' acknowledged in court would be a bitch and a half. Chances are they can't actually prove jack. If they're actually invoking legal action against you, and not just threatening to do so, then yeah you obviously should consult a lawyer.

But really, everything depends on your local laws and practices and how much they favour such accusers, and on the severity of the situation. Definitely try to find locally based advice about the situation. The internet is not your lawyer/doctor/etc...

 

If I had downloaded anything, it probably would have been something like a couple of albums, since I don't like watching movies, and I've got Steam for PC games. I also would have deleted the torrent, right afterwards, rather than seeding it, since I wouldn't want my internet to slow down.

Still, though, some of the things that I've read say that ignoring the settlement can end up with you going to court, and paying a lot in fines, rather than just a (comparably) smaller settlement fee, as well as having it be public record.

They don't actually have my name or address, right now. They can (probably?) get it from my ISP, via a subpoena, though.

Yeah, it seems like they don't have any actual "proof" at this moment, which makes sense, since I didn't do anything.

Doing that right now.

 

...not cool.

Also try looking at this.

 

It's almost never going to be worth it for them to take you through court over settling. Not unless you're a big distributor or have publicly humiliated them or something. "This is your last chance to settle" is posturing at this point.

Check if these guys (Charter?) are making a point of going after small time pirates for publicity recently. Unless that is the case, it's probably safe to ignore it. If you get a serious notice (ie subopena, search warrant, court summons, etc. something involving the legal system and not just the company), then it would be time to talk to a lawyer.

 

For the future, can I recommend the use of a decent VPN?

 

Thanks, but I don't think that I'll be doing any pirating, in the future. If I had been doing so, this probably would have "scared me straight," as it were.

 

I'd like one.

 

Honestly, wouldn't the court costs be way bigger than anything the company could get from a small-time pirater?

 

RIghtscorp, who have something of a reputation for being "copyright trolls." As far as I can tell, the only court cases were against two people, sometime last year, for a total of 450k. Not only that, but it looks like they sent out something like 2 million notices, last year. I think I'm probably safe. Hopefully.

Still kind of worrying. A few years ago, a friend of the family's daughter ended up downloading something, and they ended up paying a few thousand dollars, or something like that.

 

If you want relative security of mind, just buy a VPN service.

 

Or just get onto some decent websites to handle your copywrong needs. Sites of those types are careful to prune their membership base at the first sign of being compromised (eg an account is found to be used by a random company) which makes them a lot safer compared to more public websites.

 

Yeah, I think you'll be fine. In regards to the friend of the family's daughter: a) She probably did much worse than they're admitting to people and/or b) they made it easy for the company by not keeping their mouths shut.

 

If you're in the US a lot of providers have adopted a six strike policy. Warnings for the first one or two strikes then moving into more serious things like slowing your internet to eventual legal actions.

 

Oh, wow. Okay, looks like I misread this. A bunch of people filed a class-action lawsuit against them, and won 450k.

 

That's a pity. Copyright law is so screwed up that following it should be considered crooked.

Best course of action is to ignore scare letters, consult a lawyer should any actual real notices of legal action turn up, and take more steps to be anonymous online in future.

 

After my family got one of these letters, we decided to say that we never did anything like it as an IP-Address is no evidence that you downloaded something, it could also be somebody else using your router. We also said that we would not download this specific file again. This worked as we never heard from them again and as it was more than two years ago they now can't do anything about it.