Recently there have been news items relating to individuals who get bills in the post, or mail, requiring them to pay for downloads they may have made, allegedly, illegally. The situation is complicated by the fact that the information relating to the downloads, and arguably the downloads themselves, may have been made by agents of the billing company using the original subject’s unsecured wireless network.
A friend of mine is doing research into this, and if anyone here has experience of this, my friend and I would be grateful for any information you are prepared to share.
Post it here if you are happy to share, or PM me in privacy.
Oddly enough, not so hard as you might think.
In general, letters along these lines generally have precise details of what was downloaded - with details taken from the unsecured network.
In fact we’ve had such a letter, at a time when our network was unsecured. My wife didn’t bother to tell me about it. My son was downloading films at the time, but the film the letter mentioned was not on any of our machines. My wife secured the network, threw the letter away and has heard no more about it.
As far as I know it is limited to the UK, although U.S. laws on Speculative Invoicing are looser than those of the UK.
In the U.S. (or at least, parts of the U.S.) you can supply an invoice to people you have never met, for services you have never performed or goods that were never provided, and if they pay up, that is their hard luck.
U.K. law does not permit this, and it is regarded as fraud.
If it’s an unsecured wireless network, it seems like it could be a challenge to prove that the downloads were performed by someone inside the house.
I did read about a guy who has been successful the other way around though. He represents specific clients (mostly those who make expensive audio software). He find the IP addresses of those who are providing access to the software, and then strong-arms the ISP into blacklisting the address of the account holder. In other words, the person doing the sharing looses his broad band.
What’s really interesting is that he has been successful in shutting down Russian based hosting companies using the same tactics, because the Russian ISPs are leasing trunk lines from companies like AT&T and he can get them cut off from this end if they won’t take down the material.