It seems Tiscali is looking to find itself taken to court in the future with its cutting off policy for alleged copyright infringement, something deemed illegal by the EU.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/29/freedom2surf_copyright_accusation/Tiscali threatened to disconnect a customer for illegally downloading a TV show last week, after receiving a copyright infringement notice from a Hollywood studio. The only problem was the customer had quit the ISP months before the alleged transgression was made.
Euan MacLay had been a customer of Freedom2Surf (F2S) for two years until it was taken over by Tiscali as part of the Pipex acquisition last year. His past experience of the Italian buyer's customer service was poor, so as soon as his Freedom2Surf line was due to be migrated to Tiscali's budget network he decided to switch.
The complaint was made by BayTSP, a well-known anti-piracy contractor (see also Digiprotect, Logistep), acting on behalf of Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), the movie studio. It called on F2S to "immediately remove or block access to the infringing material".
For Euan, that the allegations against him were baseless was obvious. However, the fact that such an elementary mistake has been made so early in the government-backed rearguard action against downloaders is concerning.
There are many things wrong with this story besides the usual ineptitude of the moronic "rights holders" groups who certainly seem not to respect any of yours.
The first and most important part of the story is that this story seems to suggest
downloading was the concern in fact using this man was accused of using bit torrent and thus
uploading was the civil offence, if they stick to pretending it was downloading they are liable for action in the european courts who have said many time downloading for personal use is not illegal and it would be a breach of his human rights to disconnect him as a
downloader.
The other point of contention here is one of whether UK ISP companies are handing out customer addresses without checking the legality of the claimed infringement, bayTSP are not registered within the UK to harvest such data and as such if they wish to come to the UK to give evidence in any case they would be admitting to a criminal offence under the data protection act for which
they can be prosecuted, one has to ask how a UK ISP believes its legal to deal with such companies who break the law as they too could be held liable if your personal information is handed out.
Its my belief this is just another scare story with Tiscali receiving a complaint and merely informing the customer of the complaint and as its an uploading claim (the bit torrent system ensures you are always liable for this one unless you are using a hacked client) then they would not be too hard pressed to find a legal ground to claim breach of contract, of course any moves to disconnect a downloader would involve a considerable set of legal challenges for them, something this "news" article does not make clear.
