Imagine how you would feel if your elderly parents who struggle to pay their gas bill and need help opening a word document where accused of downloading a crappy game by some Swiss company that has illegally obtained their name and address from their ISP ?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7697898.stmGames firms are accusing innocent people of file-sharing as they crack down on pirates, a Which? Computing investigation has claimed.
The magazine was contacted by Gill and Ken Murdoch, from Scotland, who had been accused of sharing the game Race07 by makers Atari.
The couple told Which they had never played a computer game in their lives. The case was dropped, but Which estimates that hundreds of others are in a similar situation
According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers
"Some of them are senior citizens who don't know what a game is, let alone the software that allows them to be shared," he said.
Firms that facilitate file sharing, such as Pirate Bay, have been undermining efforts by anti-piracy investigators to track down file sharers.
Pirate Bay makes no secret of the fact that it inserts the random IP addresses of users, some of who may not even know what file sharing is, to the list of people downloading files, leading investigators up a virtual garden path.
It seems that these days if you have the money and a dumb ass working at the ISP company you can gather anyones private info even if you are breaking the law yourself as Logitech are, they are not a legally registered entity in the UK for gathering IP data and thus they are commiting a criminal offence under the data protection act, I for one hope they are prosecuted sooner rather than later before they give one of these old folks a coronary.
