The story's a familiar one in the US: copyright holder launches the SS Lawsuit, rolls out the driftnet, and starts catching dolphins along with the tuna. Dead grandmothers are accused of file-swapping, retirees of downloading gangsta rap. Europe hasn't seen as many problem cases, largely because it has seen far fewer lawsuits. But rightsholders haven't written off the continent, and we're seeing the old problems of misidentification pop up as the lawsuits resume. In this case, though, the target is video games.
The BBC has a report on recent efforts by Atari and others to crack down on warez. Fair enough, but the campaign is proceeding much like the music industry lawsuits in the US. Alleged infringers are identified by the IP addresses gleaned from BitTorrent and other file-swapping networks, which in turn are passed along to ISPs for lookup and identification.

The practice has repeatedly shown its flaws. In the UK, Scottish residents Gill and Ken Murdoch were recently accused of swapping the game Race07. Unfortunately for both them and Atari, the game's maker, the couple has never played video games.
Such lawsuits are expanding in the UK, and as they do, so will the problems. One lawyer working on the issue told the BBC that he has spoken with "hundreds" of people who have been wrongly accused of sharing video games.

Copyright lawsuits in Europe have not unfolded with the same scale as in the US (and here, lawsuits on a massive scale have only been brought by a single industry), but it certainly looked for a time like they would. Back in 2005, worldwide music trade body IFPI used to trumpet its global campaign. One announcement concerned 963 new cases brought in countries ranging from Finland to Iceland to Japan, with more than 11,000 total filed worldwide (but note that 9,900 of these were in the US). After the first year of the campaign, 248 Europeans had been judicially sanctioned (uncommon) or had coughed up some dough to make the problem go away.

In 2006, IFPI was still at it, filing another 2,000 lawsuits in April that targeted, among others, "a Finnish carpenter, a British postman, a Czech IT manager, a German judge, a French chef, a British local councilor, and a retired German couple."

Still, with an average settlement of ?2,633, this was still an expensive operation to run. But the sheer cost of the effort wasn't the only problem; the law began to take a closer look at what was going on, and the IFPI's efforts were weighed, like Belshazzar, in the balance and found wanting.

Non-criminal file-sharing was only a "petty offense," said German prosecutors, and didn't warrant making ISPs turn over customer data. Open WiFi networks did turn out to be an effective defense. But the biggest blow came from the European Court of Justice, which issued an advisory opinion and then a ruling (PDF) saying that there was no Europe-wide right to ISP customer information.

Every country had to balance EU directives on personal privacy and copyright, and they could do so in different ways. Only in countries where the state allowed it could rightsholders go to court with nothing more than an IP address and force ISPs to look up user data.

The decision balkanized Europe, making it more difficult to bring massive, Europe-wide sets of lawsuits. And besides, the music industry had found a new tool that it began flogging harder than a Roman galley slave: "graduated response" or "three strikes" rules.

These have been pushed especially hard in the UK and in France, and they allow rightsholders to submit complaints directly to ISPs. After each complaint, the user in question is punished, possibly ending up without Internet access for up to a year.

In the UK, the government has yet to mandate this approach, but a group of ISPs and music labels has agreed to do so privately. There will be no sanctions (yet), but identified file-swappers will receive a nastygram calling them out on their activities. And the government has threatened to take action of its own if an acceptable private arrangement was not reach by early next year.

What's odd about the current crop of gaming lawsuits is that game publishers don't appear to find this sufficient. Rather than strike a similar deal with ISPs, publishers like Atari are sticking with the court system (the UK remains a country where ISP information based on IP addresses can be demanded in court).

The BBC believes that the music industry will follow suit again next year and ramp up the lawsuit campaign in the UK. While graduated response might be useful, from the industry's point of view there's no harm in using every hook in the tacklebox. Besides, the EU Parliament has soured on the idea.

So we may see a return to the use of the legal driftnet. Any future fishing expedition may be more limited in geographic scope than the merry days of 2005-2006, but it looks likely to keep snagging dolphins along with all that tuna.
DJ Norix Reviewed by DJ Norix on . P2P driftnet fishing returns to Europe, Scottish couple snagged The story's a familiar one in the US: copyright holder launches the SS Lawsuit, rolls out the driftnet, and starts catching dolphins along with the tuna. Dead grandmothers are accused of file-swapping, retirees of downloading gangsta rap. Europe hasn't seen as many problem cases, largely because it has seen far fewer lawsuits. But rightsholders haven't written off the continent, and we're seeing the old problems of misidentification pop up as the lawsuits resume. In this case, though, the Rating: 5