{"id":68177,"date":"2009-12-07T04:34:36","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T09:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091204\/0924437205.shtml"},"modified":"2009-12-07T04:34:36","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T09:34:36","slug":"p2p-pre-settlement-letters-in-germany-may-have-been-illegal-lawyer-who-reveals-this-threatened-with-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/68177","title":{"rendered":"P2P Pre-Settlement Letters In Germany May Have Been Illegal; Lawyer Who Reveals This Threatened With Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been plenty of legal questions<\/a> over the activities of a small group of companies in Europe, including law firm Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law, Logistep and Digiprotect among others — who all seem to work together to purposely put files online<\/a> that they have licensed, and then send threat letters to the owner of any IP address that connects to them. This leads to a fair number of totally bogus<\/a> demands for people to pay up to avoid getting sued. Apparently, the business is quite profitable<\/a>, even as no actual lawsuits have been filed.<\/p>\n

Yet, now reader Dan alerts us to the news that, at least in Germany, the pre-settlement letters and relationships between these companies may be entirely illegal<\/a>. This was discovered due to a recently leaked document — the one that showed how profitable all this was — which also noted that the relationships between the various companies were not based on any direct monetary exchange:<\/p>\n


\nThe document states that “the whole project is kind of a joint venture where no party charges the other party with any costs.” The problem with such a set-up is that the pre-settlement offers are usually based on costs incurred by retaining a law office to pursue the claim. File sharers are asked to pay 450 bucks for a porn movie because it costs money to investigate their IP address and send them the cease and desist letter.<\/p>\n

However, German law specifically states that these costs can’t be based on the success of the claim. In other words: In order to invoice file sharers for lawyer fees, these fees have to occur and be paid by someone no matter whether a file sharer pays up or not. Invoicing someone for costs that haven’t actually occurred could be seen as fraud.
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Oops. After a German lawyer, Thomas Stadler, reviewed all this and posted his analysis saying that the efforts in Germany were clearly illegal under German law<\/a> (Google translation from the original<\/a>) , the German lawyer who had sent the original document (the leaked one, detailing how these operations worked), Udo Kornmeier sent him a cease-and-desist letter<\/a> (again, Google translation from the original<\/a>), demanding he take down his blog post that showed the whole operation was illegal. Apparently, lawyers who may be breaking the law in Germany don’t like other lawyers exposing them…<\/p>\n

Permalink<\/a> | Comments<\/a> | Email This Story<\/a>
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There have been plenty of legal questions over the activities of a small group of companies in Europe, including law firm Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law, Logistep and Digiprotect among others — who all seem to work together to purposely put files online that they have licensed, and then send threat letters to the owner of any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}