Posted: 06th Jan, 2012 By: MarkJ


Solicitors at
Ralli, a national UK law firm, have successfully managed to get porn lawyers
Golden Eye International to drop their
London Patents County Court case against a woman accused of using her broadband ISP connection to share copyright material (piracy) online (adult video '
Fancy an Indian?').
Golden Eye, which claims to
hold numerous film copyrights and is linked with the
Ben Dover porn brand in the UK, began its action late last year (
original news) after one of the accused failed to respond when a letter arrived
demanding a payment of £700 (i.e. "
speculative invoicing") to settle the dispute.
It's understood that Golden Eye originally sought for the case to be tried in a
County Court but attempted a pullout after it became clear that they would instead need to appear before the
London Patents County Court and possibly
Judge Birss QC. Birss is best known for putting the smack down on ACS:Law / MediaCAT's "
amateurish and slipshod" attempts to
sue 27 individuals for similar activity (
here).
Michael Forrester, Ralli Associate in the Intellectual Property and Media team, said:
"We advised from an early stage that our client had good prospects of defending the claim. Our client had protested her innocence from the start and the final outcome shows the strength of her defence.
Like previous matters of this nature, the present case involved complex legal and technical principles. These are extremely difficult for a lay person to understand and can lead to an innocent person being pursued
If individuals are faced with matters of this nature, they are urged to contact us at an early stage."
Law firms typically track related piracy by monitoring the
Internet Protocol ( IP ) addresses of online users, which are assigned to your computer each time you go online and made public by
BitTorrent (P2P) networks. However IP's can easily be faked, hijacked or even shared (e.g. public Wi-Fi, office/home networks etc.) in ways that, as the SRA's
Timothy Dutton QC described last summer, turns it into evidence of the "
flimsiest" variety (
here).
Ralli acted for the Defendant in this matter on a no win - no fee basis.