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If you go to the copyright settlements websites you can tell its fake by the terms of use section of the site
18. For Information Purposes Only.
Materials on this website have been prepared for informational purposes only and do not constitute a solicitation or legal advice. Transmission of the materials and information contained herein is not intended to create, and receipt thereof does not constitute formation of, an attorney-client relationship. The information contained in this website is provided only as general information. CEG expressly disclaims all liability in respect to actions taken or not taken based on any of the contents of this website. This website is not a substitute for legal advice. You should not rely on this website as a source of legal advice. Communications with CEG via email will not be treated as privileged or confidential.
19. CEG's website is operated by a private company not affiliated with or endorsed by any state or federal government agency or department.
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Not sure about international law, but in Australia you're only liable to the price of the product that you downloaded. Don't reply, and its your choice as to whether you continue or stop downloading copyrighted content.
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The best thing to do is just ignore these types of emails. Most of them are just scams.
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Please read the articel below and stop overreacting.
The US Copyright Group thought it had found the ideal scheme to turn piracy into profit when it started filing lawsuits against tens of thousands of BitTorrent users this year. But the defendants in the Far Cry lawsuits have now become the plaintiffs in a class action filed against the anti-piracy lawyers and their partners. Among other things, the lawyers are accused of fraud, extortion and abuse.Since the beginning of this year the United States Copyright Group (USCG) has sued tens of thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly shared films without the consent of copyright holders. One of the copyright holders who teamed up with USCG are Achte/Neunte, the makers of the movie Far Cry.
What first seemed to be a relatively effective and profitable way to turn piracy into a healthy revenue stream, is rapidly turning into a nightmare for the anti-piracy lawyers and their partners.
To add to the growing problems and difficulties for the US Copyright Group (USCG), a class action lawsuit has now been filed by the alleged file-sharers. The accusations put forward in the 96 page complaint are not mild, and could potentially put an end to this and similar cases in the United States.
The class action lawsuit is targeting all the parties involved in the Far Cry pay-up-or-else scheme. It was was filed on behalf of one of those accused, Dmitriy Shirokov, but includes others who were included in the Far Cry case.
“This is a class action brought by Plaintiff, on behalf of himself and 4,576 other similarly-situated victims of settlement fraud and extortion,” the lengthy complaint starts. The tables are turned this time with USCG, law firm Dunlap, Grub and Weaver (DGW) and Far Cry copyright holder Achte/Neunte in the defendant’s seats.
The complaint goes on to describe the practices of the anti-piracy lawyers as “lucrative trade in monetizing copyright infringement allegations,” and carefully dissects the operation and the numerous offenses that were allegedly committed by the lawyers and their partners.
In total, the alleged BitTorrent users are seeking relief based on 25 counts including extortion, fraudulent omissions, mail fraud, wire fraud, computer fraud and abuse, racketeering, fraud upon the court, abuse of process, fraud on the Copyright Office, copyright misuse, unjust enrichment and consumer protection violations.
One of the most prominent allegations against the law firm is that the copyright of Far Cry was registered at the Copyright Office after the movie was published, and after many of the alleged sharers were caught. It is claimed that the copyright registration was “intentionally obtained under false pretenses” and subsequently used to back up “baseless threats in the demand letters.”
“The Letters falsely claim that the law allows Achte to seek extraordinary forms of relief, namely statutory damages and attorney's fees, for infringing Achte's copyright for the motion picture Far Cry, despite fatal defects in its copyright registration and the express provisions of the Copyright Act,” the complaint reads.
This then leads to the following allegations of fraud, extortion and related offenses.
“The Letters sent to the proposed Class are predicated on fraud upon Plaintiff and the proposed Class, and upon the ISPs, the United States Copyright Office, and the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.”
“DGW and its fellow Defendants are directly involved in perpetrating, conspiring to commit, and/or aiding and abetting this massive scheme of fraud, extortion, abuse of
process, fraud upon the court, copyright misuse, and misappropriation of funds.”
The complaint
Another key issue is that DGW threatened to sue each and every individual they targeted, but that this would be practically impossible to achieve with the small team of attorneys they have. Also, they specifically stated to clients that cash settlement is what they are after.
“DGW does not genuinely intend to pursue most, if any, of these thousands of claims to trial. Operating through its alias USCG, DGW advertises its copyright business model to prospective clients in the film industry stating one overriding goal: to obtain settlement not judgments, which would require litigating and proving its allegations,” the complaint reads.
“With only thirteen attorneys on staff, DGW has issued a volume of demand letters that far surpasses its ability to litigate this volume of claims case by case. USCG tells prospective clients that civil prosecution of copyright claims has not been practical, in light of the financial status of individual infringers.”
The above is just the introduction of the complaint, which then continues with dozens of pages discussing the legal background, eventually concluding that DGW’s revenue model is not based on upholding copyright law, but that it capitalizes on fear and aims to intimidate. DGW extorted thousands of infringers by perpetrating fraud on the U.S. Copyright Office, the complaint alleges.
“Fraud has infected each stage of Defendants actions since that false registration, tainting their complaints, subpoenas, coercive demand Letters and websites.”
The conclusions lead to numerous allegations and eventually a long list of 25 counts for relief. The plaintiffs demand a jury trial and are seeking a wide range of damages as well as restitution and reimbursement of the money plaintiffs have spent on the extortion scheme thus far.
Among other things, the plaintiffs further seek dismissal of all court actions brought on by the anti-piracy lawyers, an injunctive relief to stop the scheme, and an injunctive relief to stop the identities of the proposed plaintiffs being revealed.
The above is just a selection from a complaint that may very well crush the future of USCG’s pay-up-or-else scheme in the United States. If anything, the lawyers and the other defendants have some serious explaining to do.
In recent months, USCG’s scheme has been copied by various other law firms, protecting a wide variety of copyright holders. Just last week the German based copyright profiteers Digiprotect launched their first two cases in the United States, and many more are likely to follow, unless a court speaks out against this type of creative use of the legal system.
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You don't download movies using torrent, use rapidshare or some other direct download site. Then it's the site's fault and not yours. The sites will protect themselves by removing the files and that's the end of it.
I only use torrent for TV shows now.
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Yeah I'd be kind of scared to get that kind of email myself... pretty sure you're not in trouble though. Most likely it's a scam, as most people have observed.
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You should be fine, ISP's get stacks upon stacks of these every day and send an email to people if you keep coming up. When you torrent your IP is fully exposed so basically people scrape torrent trackers and send the ISP lists of ip and what it is downloading.
I know many people that have gotten this and nothing happened. The ISP sends the email hoping you stop which benefits them mainly by you stopping which means you use less bandwidth and become a cheaper customer.
There are people out there that pretend to be "anti piracy groups" that spam ISP's hoping they follow through send the complaint and forward money to them. So the scam isn't visible at your level.
I'd recommend stop torrenting and forget about it.
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Seems fake and a scam. Its quite costly to engage in a lawsuit versus people and that company isnt a huge corporate giant. You wont get sued but id stop downloading stuff from torrents if i were you. Start using rapidshare and megaupload and start seeing movies streamed online if you want to get movies.
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Got two of the same emails today for two separate movies that were downloaded from my ip and have some thoughts...
First, the obvious...
The email is legit, as in, it's definitely an official charter email since the links take you right to their web site and there is plenty of documentation on the subject in their FAQ section. This is something that apparently is happening frequently. This lends enough credibility (if charter is recognizing them) that the The Copyright Enforcement Group is also legit (for what they are).
Offering a "settlement" through the email is where things get muddy. On one hand, you can say it's fishy because it's a settlement offer through an email. On the other hand even if they wanted to send you a more formal, physical document in the mail, they don't have your address. How serious they are with their threat of "settle or face an increase" I don't know and that's what worries me. If it comes to it, they can acquire your identity through charter by subpoena. Whether or not they will is the question.
Even so, if they chose to actually subpoena, that would mean bringing in a lawyer, which would cost them money. They would have to prove that the person being sued was actually the one who downloaded it- which I don't see how (especially in my case because I have an unsecured router and have caught people downloading from me in the past. After this though, I will be educating myself on how to secure it).
Logic leans toward the idea that this is a strategic way for these companies to make a quick buck. Yet 125 dollars is a lot of money to some people, and those same people who wouldn't be able to pay it, wouldn't be able to pay thousands in a lost trial to those companies. Also, that's provided that they actually lose based on evidence.
What I want to know is of the people who just ignored the settlement offer, if after the expired time, they were subpoenaed. My guess is hardly any, but there are articles floating around out there about mass people getting nailed at once. Either way, I have a month to make a decision. I will continue to research my options.
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On December 15 2010 08:07 Bonesaw wrote:
What I want to know is of the people who just ignored the settlement offer, if after the expired time, they were subpoenaed. My guess is hardly any, but there are articles floating around out there about mass people getting nailed at once. Either way, I have a month to make a decision. I will continue to research my options.
I received a very similar email from charter about 3 years ago. I didn't settle, I stopped torrenting files belonging to the company that owned the file mentioned (21st century fox). They never bothered me again. I've torrented tons of files since then with no issues. Some media conglomerations are more picky with their IPs than others. About 6 years ago I was hit by a similiar thing for a metallica albulm, again I just stopped downloading from that label for a few months and there were no repurcusions.
Honestly unless you're seeding terabytes of data of IP with high current value (like a movie before it's official release date) there's no way it's going to be costeffective for the media to prosecute you. And it's not in the ISP's interest to cooperate fully, because they don't want to lose your business either.
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Don't use thepiratebay, all I can say.
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Well I joined this for just to reply to this.
I got the same e-mail from charter and I settled. Just paid $125 and hopefully thats that. I don't want my parents to know I downloaded a porno either 
Basically the letter came through charter and yes I believe that charter verified that this site is legit. They give you a case number and password that brings you to the site which I feel is legit as well. All in all i think you can get slammed pretty hard for downloading crap and $125 isn't the end of the world.
Let me know what you guys do or what you think.
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I have gotten a couple letters over the years, and my isp has a three-strikes policy so I have to be much more careful now.
The emails are definitely real though. Torrenting is still safe for the most part unless you are downloading movies close to its DVD/Blu-Ray release date (from months ahead to months after, stay away from it to be absolutely safe.) and even then,you can usually just delete all the public trackers for it and be pretty secure.
I am starting to look into VPN services now.
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Use direct download and you will pretty much never get in trouble because you're not really doing anything illegal. It's illegal to distribute, not to possess AFAIK(internet lawyer here)
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On December 17 2010 11:18 yesplz wrote:
Use direct download and you will pretty much never get in trouble because you're not really doing anything illegal. It's illegal to distribute, not to possess AFAIK(internet "lawyer" here)
User was warned for this post
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Whatever, you did. I hope you didn't respond. That's basically admitting guilt.
The best course of action was to ignore it and immediately stop seeding the specific file. These letters and warnings vary by ISP and the files you were uploading.
Uploading movies or hot television shows, especially from private channels like HBO and Starz can get you in trouble very fast.
Best advice is to either stop, learn what to avoid, or learn how to use a proxy in regards to bittorent.
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hey guys. It's been a while. Sorry for the really long bump, but I promised you guys I would tell you what happend with this problem. A person who was curious about my situation PM'd me so I figured I'd update this blog
so it turns out nothing happened. I didn't hear from them. I guess it was a scam after all. Or maybe they take 2+ months to prepare a lawsuit against me? I doubt it. Anyway, I didn't say earlier because I was kind of embarrased to say, but it was from downloading porn lol. Yes I'm embarrassed to admit it but most of you people are guys so you should understand. From doing research, it turns out that these porn companies upload their videos to torrent sites (as a trap), and when a person downloads it, they e-mail them with threats. Why they do this with porn, I figured it was because the person who got caught would be in a situation where they would be more likely to cough up the money, since if they are exposed, they would be exposed with porn and it would ruin their image.
So I hope this blog helps anyone who comes across similar situation as me. And just a side note, the torrent that I downloaded did not have any comments on it. (Meaning the uploader probably deleted the comments that would warn other users not to download this specific torrent)
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If you ever get torrents from sites like TPB or demonoid, just don't seed them. Seeding is more likely to get you in trouble with LEA's and seeding on public servers is pointless because admins don't care about your ratio.
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Nice update, but you should still be careful with torrents. Occasionally you'll get the MPAA or something who your ISP takes more seriously so the best way is just to use other sources.
The way this works is the copyright owner usually can't do anything except for send these scare letters to the internet provider. They don't actually know who you are until they subpoena the ISP (there might be other ways but generally your ISP won't release your identity unless forced to). What the internet provider does is up to them.
In your case, your ISP basically asked you to stop downloading stuff because they don't like getting these letters. If you stop nothing will happen. If you don't and you keep getting more letters, it depends how nice your ISP is. If they're jackasses they'll give them your info and hang you out to dry. This is when you find yourself in a lawsuit. Most providers don't do this, because customers don't like companies who sell them out. But if the MPAA or whoever is really serious, the ISP might have to do it or risk getting sued themselves. In most cases though, they'll just cut off your service because you're a dangerous customer.
How do I know this? My ISP is my school. I've gotten a bunch of these letters, and my ISP's policy is to make the person who got the letter take a course on how internet copyright works (with a course fee of course).
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EPT
