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Week 7: Copyright trolling

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Copyright trolling

Copyright trolling is the use of alleged copyright violations in order to extract money from people. This phenomenon is known in many countries, and can take various forms. It is sending mass letters to supposed perpetrators. In copyright trolling are engaged professional law firms.


http://di.com.pl/pic/photo/9B50BBEC_7B8E_41D1_9C0B_1B9FFE5C4444_1402399285.jpg



The worst in describing trolling is that professional lawyers do not understand or do not want to understand the difference between "prosecution of pirates" and "commercial intimidation of people under the guise of prosecuting pirates." Some publishers and authors also do not want to see these differences.

What do they need to start an investigation and engage the police?
·      the name of the stolen fine, for example, the name of the movie
·      public ip address

The problem lies in the fact that on the internet it is extremely hard to prove something to someone. The IP address is not enough. Technology simply is ambiguous in this case. It is controversial to penalize for downloading if the technology itself imposes on  us to share it with others. What's more, most of the "pirates" are unaware of how it works at all.


How they look in this case is presented  in the graphic below.



http://dietrolldie.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/ls2.jpg


 The worst thing is that all this not about justice, the right to remuneration for the creators of their work, it's about the money that can earn law firms. Lawyers-trolls can use additional forms of pressure, for example may threaten notifying neighbors that someone pulled the pornographic movie. In a sense, copyright trolling is a taboo subject. Nobody wants to say that the lawyer may be wrong. Nobody dares to say that the alleged pirate can really be a victim. All under the guise of the "anti-piracy" delusion. We all want to believe that lawyers are always good. Unfortunately, in the case of the copyright trolling business the roles are reversed.


What to do when we get a request for payment?

Nothing - usually ends up only with threats. Lawyers, when they receive money from a group of the most frightened and most ignorant people, leave the others.


Questions:

Have you got such a letter?
Do you know any ways to defend against this business phenomenon?
Are you aware of your actions on the Internet?

Comments

Unknown said…
I think it should be illegal. It's basically threatening people into handing over money. I think the law is extremely ridiculous and copyright laws (for private usage) should be completely redesigned and softened, and they should protect the interest of the people, not corporations.
19 November 2014 at 16:28
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
19 November 2014 at 18:10
Anonymous said…
"We all want to believe that lawyers are always good."

As far as I know everybody knows that lawyers just do what they are paid for and it has nothing to do with good or evil, they just use the law.


" Lawyers-trolls can use additional forms of pressure, for example may threaten notifying neighbors that someone pulled the pornographic movie."

This is just: art. 115 § 12 k.k.

Have you got such a letter?

No, I have not, but I've seen some in the web, important thing is to never use torrents to download Polish movies.

Do you know any ways to defend against this business phenomenon?

Like you said, just ignore it, escpecially when they are threatning you unlawfully.

How much are you aware of netizen?

I don't get the question. Very much?
19 November 2014 at 18:13
PrzemekM said…
I changed the question :)
19 November 2014 at 20:47
PrzemekM said…
the problem is that the law is full of holes, and can't treat differently various sides.
19 November 2014 at 20:52
Kamil Fijałkowski said…
No, I never got a similar letter. Maybe it came to spam. Copyright on the Internet is a very hard subject. I'm often defend copyright and often break it, I'm hipocrite I know :) I'm a person who has my own photo gallery in web. I wouldn't happy if someone used my pictures without my consent. I don't know if I would have the strenght to prosecute troll
21 November 2014 at 15:50
Julia Osiak said…
Personally, I have never gotten such a letter, but I did hear about some cases and people who did. Just like Kamil said, copyright on the internet is very hard to control. I once had a situation when my picture was used without me knowing about it, but since I poster my work with a CC copyright I wasn't too mad about it. It would be nice to simply know that someone will use your work for their own piece. Unfortunately I don;t know how to defend myself from those copyright trolls, so I'm just hoping that I'll never have anything to do with them, and I try my best not to break copyrights of others.
22 November 2014 at 13:58
MartaSB said…
I've never got that letter, but I heard about this kind of trolling. I totally agree that Internet is a hard place to control in regard to copyrights.
I'm trying to be careful what I put in the Internet. In fact, there is a nice 'search with a photo' tool in Google where you can see whether someone is using your photos without your consent:

https://images.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl
22 November 2014 at 15:04
Unknown said…
I have never got such letter, but I know a guy, who got similar thing for publishing book on chomikuj.pl.

I think you can defend yourself by trying to stay anonymous in Internet. There are many ways, like using VPN or private torrent servers. Unfortunately, most of solutions require a monthly payment (not very expensive, about 3-6 $/month).

I try to be aware of my actions in the Internet. I am careful with things I download or send to others.
22 November 2014 at 20:22
Phuong Vo Viet aka Funt said…
Yeah, You are right Przemek. Moreover, I think that there are people who just do it for fun. Just like Alfred said:
" Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn"
23 November 2014 at 12:17
rf. said…
Never happened to me, hopefully never will. Nobody likes trolls, especially when they want to profit on someone else's naivety. Not knowing the law is one's own fault, but that is no reason for exploits.
23 November 2014 at 14:01
Marcin Lyzwa said…
I've never got such letter, but I know a person who got one. This letter was from one law firm in Warsaw. The data contained in this letter were true, but asked to transfer money into an account under the threat of referring the matter to the court were illegal. Lawyer colleague sent back a specially prepared response and things had calmed. Generally speaking, downloading the data from the Internet is not a crime, making them available in large quantities so. There is many ways to hide in the Internet, but is it necessary ? Nobody will chase you for downloading a movie or 100.
23 November 2014 at 14:15
Sergio Cosentino said…
Never had such letters delivered to me, never had such email (or maybe I did have but never read them) and generally speaking I never had any problems of the sort. Obviously this should be illegal since it is extremely abusive. Unfortunately I don't know any ways of solving this problem: as it was mentioned before it's a very difficult thing and finding a solution isn't easy.
23 November 2014 at 15:04
Seisyll said…
I got an email like that once. Have to say I was really horrified at that time and searched through quite some part of the internet to check if it was legit. Luckily turns out it was a scam. I hope that people that do this will burn in the deepest part of the hell, right next to JB fans.
By the way it's good to know that ip is not enough to prove someones guilt.
23 November 2014 at 16:08
Unknown said…
I never received such a letter but I heard about such cases from friends of mine, more often there were letter from the website pobieraczek.pl. I think that we should not download contents for which we haven’t obtained the rights, thereby it protects us almost completely against such lawsuits.
23 November 2014 at 16:20
Unknown said…
I heard about people who receive those kind of letter. For me this is trying to fraud people into something and someone should regulate this aspect of law because people often don't even try to defend themselves.
23 November 2014 at 20:20
Mateusz Frycie said…
Never happened to me and I hope it will never happen. You cannot feel 100% safe in Internet. There are some ways to raise privacy and sense of security but still we cannot forget about the most important one - common sense.
23 November 2014 at 20:40
Unknown said…
It's not just for fun. There are succesful law firms secialized in copyright trolling.
23 November 2014 at 20:52
Unknown said…
I've never received such letter. Internet, as it's the most popular way to communicate nowdays, has a lot of this stuff and I think (as other posters wrote) that you should never feel 100% safe using it. It's very hard to control and is often used to manipulate people.
23 November 2014 at 21:32
Unknown said…
I have never got any of those letters, however I think this is another way of internet fraud. To protect ourselfs from such things there could be two ways - first one - use license and in case of such letter just show such companies the direction where they could go with their accusations. Second one is the complicated one - be prepared, know your rights and know how to avoid such things while using pirate soft. Well, at least this is like two ways of your internet activity, if you are doing something on the internet, you have to be responsible and know what consequences it could have.
23 November 2014 at 22:34
Unknown said…
My father once got this virus, it was taking the whole screen everytime he was turning his computer on and showed a message that Polish government had found child pornography on his hard drive and thay were blocking his computer until he transfers 400 zł to a given bank account. I helped him deal with this virus (funny thing was that it was supposed to be written in a business language, but it was some sort of weird mix of Polish and Turkish filled with grammatical errors), but there are many people that are not good with computers and they will pay anything to get their screen unblocked even if they're not guilty of the crime they're being accused of. Speaking of viruses - this is dangerous and there should be some classes on how to safely download stuff from the Internet (legally, of course!), especially for the older or/and uneducated people. This might not protect them totally, but it can minimise their exposure to this kind of danger and make them more more aware users of Internet.
23 November 2014 at 23:01
Unknown said…
Oh, I recently stumbled upon an Internet crime named oszustwo nigeryjskie" and I would like to share that with you.
My friend was trying to sell her wedding dress on Allegro. A woman from abroad bought it and contacted my friend telling her that it was for her daughter who was getting married in Nigeria and it had to be delivered really quickly. She has sent my friend a bank transaction confirmation that wrote that she would get the transfer after she had sent the shipping confirmation. My friend had the dress packed up but something bothered her about this whole situation, so she did a small research. It turned out that it is not uncommon that some people buy things online, send fake payment confirmations and demand a very quick shipping to a Nigerian address. I have also found an interesting article on how one guy was dealing with this crime: http://www.komputerswiat.pl/artykuly/interwencje/2013/02/nie-da-sie-oszukac-na-allegro-nigeryjski-przekret-wciaz-dziala.aspx I encourage you to read it as it occured to me that this type of theft is getting really popular. Don't get tricked into it!
23 November 2014 at 23:12
Unknown said…
I never got such letter or maybe I just don’t know about it. Anyway copyrights is hard topic and complex one. Nowadays everyone is trying to protect their work and I can understand that but I don’t understand all the movement and actions on the Internet.
24 November 2014 at 09:07
Unknown said…
This shouldn't be legal. It reminds me about the incident I had. That I just came to one website because I was looking for something. To download the program I was just ask to give name and email address so I didn't see nothing wrong with it. And after couple of weeks after that I started to receive emails where was written that I have to pay 100 zł because the pay-free access to the side expired. And there were many mails where somebody even order me to pay it he quoted to penal code and what's more surprising I receive a letter to my home! Fortunately, I read something about this website and it was their politics to trick people on money
30 November 2014 at 19:42
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