Anti-pirates hit Danish P2P users with huge bills

Court orders ISPs to reveal names, addresses

By Kasper Larsen • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 26th November 2002 00:37 GMT

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The Danish Anti Pirat Gruppen (Anti Piracy Group) has issued invoices of up to $14,000 apiece to approximately 150 users of KaZaA and eDonkey for illegally downloading copyright material.

APG monitored the file sharing networks for available files with Danish IP addresses - and went to court to get the users' personal details from their ISPs, armed with screen shots of, for example, the KaZaA window showing the files on the user's hard-drive. The courts obliged and ordered the ISPs to deliver the personal details of the incriminated users. Then the bills were in the post ... landing on the mats of the unfortunate downloaders over the last few days.

The users are charged about $16 per CD and about $60 per full length movie. If they pay now - and delete the illegal content from their hard drives - then the amount is cut in half and they avoid going to court. Those who don't pay up are to be sued.

Question is: if the APG has only the file names from KaZaA or eDonkey - how can it make sure that they really are illegal files and not only "similar named files" or hoax files? Can APG prove that is the work of a certain user in a household - or will it go for the entire family?

We'll keep you posted ... ®

Kasper Larsen is the founder of Klarisma.com, a specialist in data mining, statistics and optimizing the development of advanced Web user interfaces.