on 20 June 2008Ever heard of a computer game called Two Worlds? Nor had I, until last month. We weren’t missing much: outside its publisher’s native Germany, reviews were lukewarm. So why are hundreds of people in the UK being forced to pay £600 for it?
The demands are coming from Topware, part of Zuxxez Entertainment AG, a small company based in Karlsruhe. Karlsruhe is historically the centre of the German justice system, and perhaps it was this that inspired Topware’s novel response to the illicit copying that’s always plagued the games industry. Not content with tens of thousands of retail sales of Two Worlds, Topware monitored peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks to see who was swapping it for free. Using court orders to make Internet service providers disclose personal information, they identified users from whom others were copying the game. Then they sued them.
According to Topware’s CEO, Dirk P Hassinger, they’re going after 1000 sharers in the UK and more in Germany, up to 80,000 in total. Each is asked to pay 300 Euros, or £600 – apparently ‘legal costs’ are higher here – with the threat of court action if they fail to comply. Hassinger, who admits P2P users may not even realise they’re acting as a download source, says a case that reached court in Germany resulted in more than 20,000 Euros (£16,000) being awarded. No matter that these users gained nothing from file sharing and may never have run the £20 game. ‘We are determined to sue everyone we find.’
After I was contacted by a man who’d received a £600 demand despite having no knowledge of Two Worlds, I tried to speak to Davenport Lyons, Topware’s London solicitors and the recipients of an undisclosed portion of those ‘higher legal costs’. I wanted to clarify a few details and ask them if they really thought all this was in the public interest. But the person who answered the phone refused even to tell us his own name.
Journalists aren’t fond of that sort of thing, so I pushed. Davenport Lyons still didn’t call me, but their heavyweight PR company, Bell Pottinger, did. Through them, I obtained some answers from DL that were short on facts and long on criticism of my attitude. (Hard to believe, I know.)
‘We are an open and transparent organisation,’ huffed another unnamed DL spokesperson, declining to be quoted or interviewed or to meet me in the car park. He, she or it did confirm that they’d already approached 500 users last year in respect of Dream Pinball, another Topware game, of which five were due in court. ‘[Our] client has gained little financial return… but we believe the deterrent effect has been substantial.’ Oh, that’s all right then. But if you wanted to deter people, wouldn’t you try to publicise the wrongs of file swapping rather than silently grabbing cash off random individuals?
This kind of guerrilla action is worrying enough, but meanwhile the bigger guns are being rolled out. The US Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a putative international treaty that has naff-all to do with counterfeiting and everything to do with Big Copyright versus little you. Customs officers, for example, could start impounding and destroying infringing materials, such as a MacBook with an unlicensed MP3 on it. The civil liberties organisation IP Justice characterises ACTA as a ‘misguided effort to increase government spying and ratchet up IPR enforcement at public expense’, and calls for a ‘distinction between the types of infringements that actually do cause the public serious harm… and those that only impact profit margins.’
Behind these proposals are politicians, but only in the way Andy Pandy is behind Looby Loo. Someone else is pulling the strings. Among the representatives backing ACTA is Howard Berman, a supposedly liberal Democrat from California. In 2006, his reelection campaign received $180,000 from the entertainment industry. It must be tough to maintain your ethical balance with Time Warner, News Corp and Sony shovelling cash into your pockets.
Thus destabilised, otherwise intelligent people can be convinced that any limit on intellectual property enforcement is a threat to the economy. Unless every infringer is mercilessly crushed, musicians won’t play, movie people won’t work, and software companies won’t sit around having meetings about which features they’re going to leave out of version 11 so that they’ve still got something to sell us in version 12.
But why does it matter whether music gets played, movies made and so forth? Presumably because it’s important that people should be able to enjoy those things. And in that case, we need to protect our right to that enjoyment, and prevent it being shorn and shackled on the whim of the pen-pushers and bean-counters who masquerade as the moral guardians of others’ creations.
Not to mention our right to get through the day without some ambulance chaser mugging us for several times the money that we never owed their self-righteous pickpocket of a client in the first place.
Adam Banks never liked games with orcs in anyway.
adambanksdotcom @gbarl Bah, missed your Watchdog. Do they do it on iPlayer?