Letter from sky RE: illegal music downloads

[dog-man]

I have received a letter from sky informing me that the BPI have identified me as downloading illegal music. I was given an idea of what was downloaded and the date and time of the incident.

The letter was very customer friendly and non threatening, but and it is a big but.....


I am over 50 and have never heard of the artist who's music I am supposed to have downloaded. I was also on night shift at the time it was downloaded, so I am totally innocent.

Now, should BPI claim I do it again and perhaps take it further, how the hell do I prove I am innocent?

Before anyone asks, I do have children living at home, a 20 and 18 year old. Neither are very computer savvy. They can play games and use email, but that is about it.

I have questioned them and both say not guilty, and I do believe they are being honest.

My router has security enabled and I do not enable DHCP or whatever it is called, I allocate specific ip addresses.


dog-man

[IWasNotTheEnemy]

who's the artist in question?

[dog-man]

The Klaxons.

A Track called 'Two Receivers'.

That was at least part of a download,

I know of them now because my children do know them, but none of them like them.


dog-man

[Isitme]

Do you have a torrent or P2P client installed on your PC? If you have, there will be a record on it of what has been downloaded.
I think that is one of the drawbacks of dynamic IPs, Sky may have a record of who was using a particular IP at a given time, but whoever reads the information might not be doing it correctly.

[murdock]

Check out this thread:
has anybody had a letter yet ?

Especially the link in post 11.
Sounds familiar.

"According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers.

He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to "hundreds" of others, he told the BBC.

[Undecided Adrian]

Piratebay have publicily admitted to sending out "spoof" IP addresses just to confuse the situation.

As I said beofre if I got one of those letters I would be joining the legal challenge for deformation of character, the BPI don't seem to have a clue what they are doing and don't seem to understand what is going on in the real world.

[Trebor901]

if they cant prove you've done it either i.e. by searching your hdd then they cant take any further action.

[Isitme]

^^^^^^^^
I doubt if you are correct, it would be too easy for an illegal downloader to wipe or even change the HDD before it was examined. They may even have two or more PCs which they could conceal. In the few court cases there have been in UK it has only been necessary to prove that the download was done by a specific IP address and that address was owned by the accused at the time of the download. To my knowledge there has not been a defended case of ilegal downloading, all the accused have capitulated. I can't recall one brought for music downloads, only games, although there may have been.

[Undecided Adrian]

That's quite interesting considering that Pirate bay admit they spoof IP addresses, perhaps now time for some reasonable doubt as they do this.

Although in civil court it would still be based on balence of probabilites so you could still come a cropper even if your IP was a spoofed one.