Five games firms fine 25,000 file-sharers

Looking for £7.5m in damages

NEWS: 21 August 2008 19:03 GMT by Verity Burns

Five top game firms are planning to fine 25,000 British gamers for illegally downloading their software through file-sharing networks.

Codemasters, Atari, Reality Pump, Topware and Techland are seeking £300 in damages from each of the 25,000 - racking up a massive £7.5 million in total.

The firms are currently asking ISPs for contact details and are prepared to take the first 500 refusing the pay the fine to court.

This comes after a landmark court-ruling earlier in the week saw a gamer who downloaded Dream Pinball from a file-sharing site being ordered to pay £16,000 in damages to the game's US developers, Topware Interactive.

Legal firm Davenport Lyons is representing the five companies in this case.

Roger Billens, a partner at Davenport Lyons, said about the Topware ruling: "Our clients were incensed by the level of illegal downloading. In the first 14 days since Topware Interactive released Dream Pinball 3D it sold 800 legitimate copies but was illegally downloaded 12,000 times. Hopefully people will think twice if they risk being taken to court."

The report by The Times newspaper suggests that over six million Britons have illegally downloaded games - with it being the hot topic of the moment to sue on, better make sure you aren't one of them.

>> News - 100 Brits taken to court by US publisher
>> Via - MCV

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Have Your Say

While I see the company's annoyance, I don't see how sueing their customers is going to get them anywhere.

Codemasters have already spent thousands protecting their games from piracy which has been largely unsuccessful. It inevitably gets cracked and in the end does not boost sales.

Look at Oblivion, which had huge sales - yet was ridiculously easy to copy.

Good games sell well. And sueing your customers is not a popular move. The sooner companies realise this the better.
John, UK
It's only right that publishers protect their products. Do gamers think that zero revenue to the publishers will encourage game development? Illegal dowloading is killing future development because it reduces revenues. making a modenr game is very expensive and very risky. I hope the illegal downloaders are caught and heavily fined.
Steve, UK
If you think about it , everybody that uses the net is in breach of some law or another, as far as i,m concerened if there is a game,file,document out there and i can gain access to it, I Will download it, so come on ,lets go to court, i would not pay the fine anyway and pass all my belongings to an anymous person.
Reagan. M, crappy UK
I think this article needs to be more accurate, in that they are going after people sharing the game, not simply downloading it.

While it's true that most sources for illegal software require to share as you are downloading, not all do.
Joe Shmoe, uk
This is obviously a failed software games maker trying to sheer up profits by falsely accusing and extorting money with menaces.

The whole lot of company directors should be sent to prison forthwith!

This sinister development will come back to haunt them, you mark my words.
Henry, UK
So this company's modus operandi is this: make a crappy game nobody wants to buy, then sue the few people that wanted to try it out. I wonder if I'd get a loan if I explained this business plan to my bank manager. In any case, I won't be buying (or downloading) any games from these five firms, I hope a lot of other people follow suit.
Cixelsid, Germany
A few things I like here; for one I like that fact that one law firm is representing five different companies, five times the pay. Secondly I like how a game that according to what was said in this article that a £30 game is worth about £300 in court. So if the company which games sold 800 copies took to court the 12000 people who illgegally downloaded it they could make £360000 if the game was priced at £30, even at £5 it would get them £60000.

Now I'm just thinking out loud here but if I made a marginally successful that sold at £30 and 30000 people bought it and I needed some more money to get some profit, I could just sue the people who downloaded it illegally for £300 and make up my profits. So my point is £300 is a bit steep, but I guess if it was any less then whats the point of going to court. Also 12000 cases is just taking up the courts precious time.

So I think this can probably go two ways either file sharing will eventually become illegal or companies will keep taking people to court until everyone stops. As a final option I guess people won't buy games from companies that sue people and they go bust, either I'm happy.
Riccardo, England
Until recently, It appeared you could blatently download anything you liked with complete impunity. If there had been a real possibility of ending up in court for filesharing before titles like Dream Pinball had been released, then things would have been very different. The mere threat of trouble would have put off some people from going near filesharing programs ( it kills kittens you know! ). Others would have avoided detection using their super-turbo-anti-detection-disguises and the remainder would still have got caught for genuinely not having a clue.
As it is, this 'new way of detering filesharing' is going to be used to clobber people for things they did before a real deterent existed. It might be a nice little earner in the short term, but the fallout of badwill and unlikelyhood of ever receiving 1p from all those people ever again will hurt eventually.

Jamie Flubert, England