Getting sued for downloading Debian?
Samstag, April 23, 2011 - malenki at 23:59 in Computer
<edit on 2011-04-2011:>
Today the Abmahnung Miss Distelmeyer recieved turned out to be a faked one.
This offence was reported to the local police.
See the forum at 6th post. Thanks to Miss Distelmeyer she updated me via email.
What remains is the taste of a really bad joke and a somewhat unhappy easter weekend.
Hope you will get the villain.
</edit>
Today a german Miss Distelmeyer got snailmail.
It contained an Abmahnung¹ which an attorney sent being authorised by the software company “Media Art Holland b.v”.
Object of our mandate is the copyright infringement you committed via the Bittorrent Network on the software Debian 5 on which our client holds the rights of use and exploitation.
Miss Distelmeyer is demanded to pay 702,84 EUR (only costs of the authorised attorney) and to confirm she never ever will infringe the above mentioned copyright, that means: upload or download Debian.
Miss Distelmeyer could reach her attorney (even as this is the long easter weekend, what a coincidence she got the letter today!) and made an appointment for Tuesday. She sais her attorney has knowledge of GPL and OSS quite above standard level.
The torrentlink of the Debian she downloaded in January was from the official Debian site.
She already has informed some bigger TV broadcaster, yellow press computer newspaperand a good IT-related newspaper. She plans to inform Debian developers. I haven’t found out if she has done that by now but the fact itself already showed up on the Debian-legal mailing list here and here
In the forum where she posted the issue she also was pointed to good online media, the Chaos Computer Club, the EFF and the FSFE.
On Tuesday she will also contact some more media via phone.
At the forum also some not so obvious but interesting points are mentioned:
Is it allowed to monitor downloads and collect downloaders data when only Free Software is affected?
Why has the judge of the County Court in Augsburg not seen the absurdness of this claim/ criminal complaint?
¹
Here a short abstract how a german “Abmahnung” regarding copyright issues mostly is started by the companies and lawyers protecting their rights:
*Company holding the rights looks for infringements regarding their products in P2P networks. If it sees an infringement, it collects date, time and IP address. A screenshot or a plaintext log is all they need.
*With a printout of this they make a criminal complaint at a federal prosecutor near a copyright friendly court. (Third party attorneys reported they saw several folders full of such stuff in a court.)
*The prosecutor has to start an investigation during which a judge of the court rules that the telco has to decipher the IP to a human readable name and address. Even as most of the criminal complaints are dismissed because of triviality now there are names and addresses in the files.
*The attorney of the rights-holding company requests access to the records and so gets the addresses and now can send Abmahnungen all over Germany.
Abmahnungen were invented by legislative to settle small stuff without having to bother a court but were turned into a licence to print money by some attorneys with ethics low enough.
Source: http://www.lima-city.de/thread/abmahnung-im-haus
via
This article is licensed CC-by-SA 3.0