Comments on aprigliano.org: What to do with a Comcast DMCA takedown notice (es...

Yeah, over here in the UK we are starting to have ...

2009-02-05T03:56:00.000-05:00

Yeah, over here in the UK we are starting to have very, very similar problems. An outfit called Davenport Lyons are skipping the relatively benign take down notice and going straight to threats of court, unless you pay them ~£600.The problem is, these very scary letters are being sent to a growing number of entirely innocent people who have never even heard of P2P.

These letters are sent to you at your home address, after they get your details from your ISP via a court order. Joy.

The best bit? When people have written back, asking for the MAC address of the alleged offender they get a reply from Davenport Lyons along the lines of "A MAC address can be easily faked, so we're not going to supply that". Yeah, cos an IP is so very reliable at identifying an alleged infringer. More like their "forensic" experts don't harvest that data at all because they're *that* sloppy.

This seems like a wise move, to get that other MAC...

2009-02-04T22:04:00.000-05:00

This seems like a wise move, to get that other MAC address off your plan. Unfortunately, most people don't even know what a MAC address is.

Because Copyright infringement costs are so high, if any MAFIAA company took you to court, even if you were innocent, well I'd probably just pay the settlement fee, even being innocent, because of the lower risk. Apparently lots of people feel the same way, as thousands of these filesharing cases have been settled out of court. After all, it's probably safer to pay a couple grand to the MAFIAA than be floating face down in the river, financially speaking.

I asked something to the same effect during the fi...

2009-01-31T14:23:00.000-05:00

I asked something to the same effect during the final call. He said there was no other way to figure out who currently is in possession of my old cable modem. Sad, really, if they are a paying customer - it is not their fault.

Hang on. He simply disabled the modem? He didn't...

2009-01-31T08:59:00.000-05:00

Hang on. He simply disabled the modem? He didn't reassign it to the correct account? So when the current holder of that modem phones to complain about a connection failure, the next tech will simply re-enable it again, not knowing why it was disabled in the first place.

I did not do the downloading. There is no reason f...

2009-01-22T18:51:00.000-05:00

I did not do the downloading. There is no reason for them to even have on file anything that says otherwise. And "at least not this time" as you said doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in Comcast, especially when they can be compelled by a court to release the names of "John Does."

In the end this was a unique situation that was more a hardware tracking problem for them, but, if I did not pursue this, the current owner of my old cable modem could have, and probably would have, continued infringing in my name.

I am wondering how this can bite you in the ass, d...

2009-01-22T17:57:00.000-05:00

I am wondering how this can bite you in the ass, didn't the tech mention that the copyright holder had no information on you? Comcast will act as a middleman for those fucks but they won't give your personal info out, at least not at this time... Trash that letter and be a bit more careful where you DL your content from. Downloading scene releases will minimize your risk, make sure to grab the torrent posted first and to read the comments.