Last week we reported about Dmitriy Shirokov, one of the 4,577 defendants in the Far Cry file-sharing mass litigation who has filed a class-action lawsuit against the US Copyright Group and the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver on behalf of himself and the other “victims of settlements fraud and extortion”. This week, another victim is speaking out about the injustices he too has encountered as one of those victims.
Tom, a retired engineer who would only reveal the details of his experience under an assumed identity, had never even heard of the movie Far Cry when he received a notification from his ISP telling him that his information was being subpoenaed.
"We never heard of [this film], hadn't seen it, had no knowledge of it," Tom told Nate Anderson of Ars Technica. On the dates the alleged infringements took place there was "nobody else in the house but my wife and I,” Tom claims. All he knew was that he was being accused of something he didn’t even know how to do and could be facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
He eventually discovered that his wireless router was not password protected, so someone in the neighborhood could have been using his connection to share the movie without his knowledge. "Maybe a 12-year old can figure it out, but at [my age] it's not that easy," Tom says, regarding his router security.
But that explanation didn’t make Tom any less guilty in the eyes of the USCG. When he discovered that he couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer he wrote letters to the court, but received no responses. His ISP would not help, and he didn’t want to settle, but saw no alternative.
"I was inclined to defend it to the last straw, but when it comes down to a cardboard box under the bridge or maintaining your modest lifestyle… [It's] just an outrageous scam,” Tom says. “It's organized crime on their part."
Tom was fortunate enough to be among the 4,437 Far Cry defendants to have their cases dropped from the District Court of Washington DC because the alleged crimes did not occur within the court’s jurisdiction. He and the rest of the defendants are waiting to see whether the USCG will re-file the cases in the proper courts.
Stories like Tom’s are the reason why these types of mass file-sharing lawsuits need to stop. There isn’t enough compelling evidence of wrongdoing for the USCG and their lawyers to be demanding thousands of dollars in settlement fees. Hopefully, the courts are beginning to see these defendants as the extortion victims they actually are.
