Firms Accuse Non-Gamers Of Piracy

Atari has dropped a game piracy case against an older couple that has never played a video game, but there are reportedly hundreds of other instances.

Intellectual property is important to companies, and they will prosecute people who violate it. But they’re not always right. Take what happened Scotland’s Gill and Ken Murdoch, who were accused by Atari of sharing the game Race07. As the couple, aged 54 and 66, told consumer magazine Which, they’d never played a video game in their lives.

The Murdochs received a letter giving them the option of paying around $900 in compensation or be taken to court. Gill Murdoch said:

"We do not have, and have never had, any computer game or sharing software. We did not even know what ‘peer to peer’ was until we received the letter."

That case was dropped, although no explanation was given, but companies monitor peer-to-peer networks and many turn to anti-piracy companies that identify those illegally sharing files by their IP address. In the UK, with that information they can apply for a court order meaning the ISP has to turn over information on the address holder.

However, solicitor Michael Coyle insists many people are wrongly identified as file sharers.

"Some of them are senior citizens who don’t know what a game is, let alone the software that allows them to be shared," he told the BBC. "The IP address alone doesn’t tell you anything. Piracy is only established beyond doubt if the hard-drive is examined."

People can piggyback on unsecured wireless networks, for instance, and no law exists requiring people to make their networks secure. File-sharing facilitators such as Pirate Bay acknowledge inserting random IP addresses into lists of those downloading files to mislead investigators.