“Innocents Accused of Net Piracy” – What Else Is New
Posted by Michael Klurfeld | Filed under Michael
When I woke up this morning, what did I see? A really naive sounding story from the BBC. So as we in the US know all too well, time and time again, the guys who claim that they’re going after fileshaing and internet piracy get their facts wrong and end up suing innocent people, wasting their time and money. For example, do you think an elderly immigrant who barely speaks English is a filesharer? Probably not. So it’s mind-boggling to me that a headline out of a recent BBC story is “Innocents Accused of Net Piracy.” Sure the story has the prerequisite massive fail in it: some 20 people are accused of sharing a video game called “Dream Pinball,” a game which none of them have ever heard of. But really? Is this news?
Monitoring software gets stuff wrong all the time. In this case, it was the folks at Logistep whose software started aiming and firing at non-targets, but this stuff happens all the time. MediaDefender, the RIAA’s lapdog for monitoring stuff, is infamous for DDoSing the completely legitimate website Revision3 last year over what they perceived as piracy. This is a business that presumably lost a good deal of money because MediaDefender took it upon themselves to dole out punishment. It’s amazing that no one from MD has gone to jail over this – if some organization hired bouncers to not let anyone into your store for a day, it seems like that would be in violation of some law.
Maybe Britain is better about actually accusing the bad guys, but I suspect they’re not. Our neighbors across the pond are certainly more openly concerned with growing pains in the digital age (they amount of press the Digital Britain report got tells us that), but it seems probable that in every country with copyright laws, there are people taking the fall for infringement they did not commit.
