German court rejects claim against P2P user-> 1
Submitted
by
doppelfish
doppelfish writes "A german court (AG Offenburg) has rejected the desire of the public prosecution office to learn the identity of users from the IPs of computers that were allegedly sharing copyrighted material. A german lawyer firm had filed complaints against the users in the hope of learning the identity of the users so that they could file civil charges against them. The court decided that the ISPs could not be queried for the identities of the users under restriction of commensurability. The court argued that the desire of the public prosecuters ran "against the laws of logic" since the lawyer firm could not prove significant damage besides a single download that they had initiated themselves. The court also denied the complaint about lost sales, arguing that demand would increase artificially when goods, i. e. music files, were availlable for free, leading to an increased number of downloads by people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the music. To back up this decision, the court cited a 2004 Harvard study which shows that the damage to the music industry by P2P sharing networks tends towards zero. The court also denied the charge of intentional sharing, arguing that five common P2P clients "insist" on uploading data without their users knowledge. The court also recognized the strategy of private law firms to file "up to 10'000 criminal complaints" with the only intent of learning the identity of the users for the purpose of filing "exagerated claims against those users".
A public prosecutor who asked for his name to be withheld said that public prosecutor offices will strive to obtain more court verdicts in this spirit to relieve their offices from the mass of criminal charges which keep them from prosecuting much more important crimes."
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