factual wrote:Golden Eye International have been back in court today.
Dinah Greek has been tweeting from the courtroom:
https://twitter.com/#!/DinahGreek
Edit: and ORG have a blog post on the hearing: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/201 ... ng-returns
While every attempt will be made to seek a settlement out of court we will not hesitate to enter into court proceeding with those who fail to acknowledge our intellectual property rights.
But Cohen said test cases were not economically viable for Golden Eye.
Despite the repeated failure of similar schemes, Golden Eye International, a dubious law firm that claims to hold numerous film copyrights and is linked with the UK’s Ben Dover porn brand, has today gone to court in an attempt to extract the customer details for around 9,000 internet connections (IP addresses) from ISP O2 UK (Telefonica). If it wins then thousands of users, specifically those whom it accuses of “illegal” online piracy, could expect to receive threat letters (“speculative invoicing“) that demand payments of £700 to settle the offence.
Law firms typically track alleged abuse by monitoring the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of online users via public P2P (File Sharing) networks (an IP is assigned to your connection each time you go online) before taking the responsible ISP to court (aka – Norwich Pharmacal Order) in an attempt to extract the related data. Past cases against similar law firms, such as the now notorious ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons, have repeatedly helped to highlight the problems with doing this.
At best an IP can only identify the connection owner, whom may or may not be the guilty party (e.g. shared public WiFi networks, hotel internet, business networks, libraries etc.). At worst an IP can be faked, hijacked, redirected or the ISPs log files might be slightly out of sync with the law firms and would thus return details for the wrong customers. Worryingly this is exactly the sort of data that the UK governments related Digital Economy Act (DEAct) will use when it comes into force at some point in the near future.
The UK solicitors firm Ralli was able to squash Golden Eye’s previous attempt to use such data after it tried to make its case by suing a woman accused of using her broadband ISP connection to share an adult video (‘Fancy an Indian?‘). Surprisingly that hasn’t stopped Golden Eye trying the same thing again and this time it’s on a similar sort of scale to ACS:Law, you know, that law firm which fell apart over some of the same issues last year.
concerned100 wrote:Re evidence, I see that according to the Crossley judgment, it's supposed to show:
'that the IP address holder had either personally downloaded or made available THE WHOLE OR A SUBSTANTIAL PART of the clients’ copyright' etc.
That is the acid test as it is the current legal definition of copyright theft (or infringement of coryright).
Will be interesting to see the Court's view on the Golden eye evidence.
Ahh, but that's just the point, as I was indicating earlier. There will be no view put forward by the court on GEIL's evidence because it will not be raised. This is exactly how Crossley slipped his NPO past the court with the first judge, who openly admitted he had no competence with the technicalities of the matter and so had to rely on the expert witness provided by Crossley (i.e. Clem Vogler, the property dealer and physics teacher).
All of this speculative invoicing would come to a grinding halt if someone would just force the claimants to put up or shut up in regard to the technical veracity of their data collection methods.
As much as anything these cases just show up the inadequacy of the expert-witness vetting system.

Mullard47 wrote:I wonder how Consumer Focus got involved.
concerned100 wrote:I wonder who Cohen's instructing solicitors were. Maybe Golden eye's tactic is to write to people direct, bypassing the use of solicitors to avoid scrutiny of the Law Society. I recall that they used some solicitor for the attempts to claim online.
concerned100 wrote:Yes I remembered it appeared to be a sole practitioner although I can't be bothered to look him up. Can't imagine that they would persuade any large firm to get involved after DL etc. Maybe the court will appoint a supervisor. Will be interested to see whether they get the NPO and if so whether they write to people themselves or e.g. involve e.g. a sole prac. i.e. someone they can replace easily if he gets put off. No reason why their own letter shouldn't work to frighten people into paying, with the threat of court proceedings and a packet of docs.
Mullard47 wrote:Actually, my recollection is that when GM applied for that NPO for MoS which eventually went totally pear shaped, they had already run into problems with it prior to the ACS leak and BT changing their position and opposing it.
Does anyone actually know what was going on that caused the first adjournment, because if BT was not opposing it at that stage, then it looks like either someone else intervened, or the judge hearing the application instigated something on his own initiative.
We haven't been approached and the latest NPO hasn't been granted. A lot was learnt from the ACS:Law debacle though so I'm sure there'd be a reasonable amount of resistance on our part.
concerned100 wrote:We know this as does Guy Tritton so let's hope all this background has some impact on the NPO action and any further attempt at speculative invoicing. Golden eye is unbelievably persistent what with TBI, moneyoneline and now this so they must see letter writing as any easy money spinner, even after DL and Crossley. They must think, prob. rightly, that a new batch of recipients will just pay up, and if they write themselves rather than use solicitors, nobody will stop them as long as they don't bring cases to court. Their counsel has denied that this is spec. invoicing presumably on the basis that, if people pay, they are admitting liability, have really infringed copyright, and this justifies the exercise. Presumably they have the right to threaten proceedings, even if they never issue, figuring it's worth it for those who just pay up.
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