 Wir haben jetzt heute Erdgeist hier und die Beata Huberig, die beiden haben sich mit dem Thema sehr intensiv auseinander gesetzt und werden uns jetzt erzählen, wie man was dagegen tun kann oder was man dagegen schon getan hat, was man künftig noch dagegen tun kann. Die Beata ist Rechtsanwältin in Berlin und engagiert sich bei Freifahrung und beim Torprojekt und Erdgeist ist Open Source Developer, kommt auch aus Berlin und macht nebenbei noch Chaos Radio und den OMPodcast und engagiert sich im CCC. Einen herzlichen Applaus für die beiden. Die Beata ist eine bestimmte Beata, die alle Websites auf ihren Websites haben. So, even if these Season Desist Letters are actually unlawful, some people are so afraid of them that they would allow these Season Desist Letters to continue and will pay the money, the fine that is invoked on there. So in order to start this topic in a way that you can understand, we now have to do the boring legalese that's important here. Now, let's imagine there's something file shared and there's a huge lawyer firm that has asked a firm to check whether there's something that is protected by some sort of property law. And then they will find the IP address, will find the Internet, the ISP, that is the Internet Service Provider and they will go to a judge. The judge will give them a formal letter that allows them to go to the ISP, that will give them the data of the person whose this IP belongs to. And then they will write a 50-page document that looks quite scary and they send them out in mass. All of them have blank payment checks basically that you can just send out. What they actually tell, what is actually written in this letter is that if you pay this, we will not go to court with your infraction, with your copyright infraction. At this point, once you get this letter, the Season Desist Letter, you're actually already in court officially. The procedure has already started. So if you get this letter and ignore it, it's bad for you. So the best way to deal with this is actually, this is not right, this does not apply to me. So the easiest way to get out of this for users is actually to just pay the money. But that's why a lot of people just pay the money even though officially they're not entitled to this money. So if you can prove that you're not the person committing this copyright infringement, sometimes it's quite easy to get out of it. But sometimes they're quite persistent. So sometimes you will get a better offer, you will, oh well, you were supposed to pay 400 Euros, but now you only have to pay 200 Euros. But some of them are actually sold to more aggressive firms that will then do this more aggressively. So there's three ways to resolve this. One way is after three years the term on this is limited and you leave and it goes away. Another way is for a, another way is to, sorry. So I'm on the part of all. This is because I found many, many topics, many, many things that simply don't work or shouldn't be allowed to work as they do. That sometimes work in front of a court and sometimes they don't. We don't even have a very clear cut justice. We don't have a lot of precedence. I've concerned myself with this, I've been concerning myself with this since 2012 when I met some of the Freifunk folks who told me of this seasoned desist industry. And I thought that it was important to actually find out where these seasoned desist letters come from and what they're for. And I'm going to tell you ten things that aren't okay in a legal context about these seasoned desist letters. There's even more to these, but these are ten things. It all starts with the, with the right to information that the copyright holders have and they visit their local court for the internet service provider. And the copyright holders claim, they use lots of legal terms to claim that file sharing has been committed at a large scale and they want to know who owned the IP addresses at the time. And the law covers the duty to give this information, but only if the alleged crimes have been committed at a large scale, at an industrial scale. And this industrial scale is defined and it's defined as the number of copyright infringements. But there is no number. There aren't even any estimations, there are no estimates. Is it five times, five fifty, five hundred, five thousand times? No estimates. Like, it's this work, it came out in such and such a year and these people copied it. But the mere presumption that this work has been copied millions of times potentially, that's enough to claim that these infringements have been committed at an industrial scale. With no need to be able to prove it. So, these claims really should not be allowed to happen. It also means that people who sit at home and watch a film and automatically upload it, because that's how their file sharing works, suddenly become copyright infringers at an industrial scale without realising it. And only this permits copyright holders to access the IP information. The second thing that's been bothering me this entire time is the basis of these claims. The basis is firstly the IP address and secondly a hash value. There are no further investigations, no further information, that's it, that's all that these claims are based on. And then there's this lovely idea of license analogy, of course in a civil procedure. The question is always, has there been a damage and if so, how much, how high was the damage. So, if I consume a film at home illegally, in that case I didn't go to a store, use other legal means of accessing that film. So, I didn't pay 30 euros or 50 euros to watch a film. Is it reasonable to assume a damage of a double digit figure? Yes, it would be. And if that were so, all these proceedings wouldn't be lucrative, they wouldn't make sense. And that's why there is license analogy. And the people sending out the cease and desist letters claim that you would have had to purchase a license that would have allowed you to distribute our works internationally around the whole world. And of course these don't exist, these are purely fictional. But they're used to push these claims into triple digits, because of course nobody would buy these licenses, as I said, they're purely fictional. And then the amount that's purely arbitrary, the amount that is used in these legal procedures, some judges say it's a thousand euros, some say it's 5000 euros. This would be local courts. And there are even some judges who claim it's 15,000 euros. And there's no reason to this. It's purely arbitrary, it's like wheel of fortune when you stand in front of a court. And it's so important because all other costs depend on what is being claimed for, on the amount involved. So your legal fees depend on these amounts. So this is a way to deter people. It actually isn't about this one person that's in civil law, that is in terms of not respecting someone's copyright. But the actual point is to deter other people from doing this, because this is an expensive thing. Now, that's something that I'm having a real problem with, because in civil law the deterrence effect cannot exist. So now the third thing is that the technical information that you usually only get in court and not outside of court, not before. And there you really, it's really a question of faith. Some judges say, well, I don't really believe there's something in there. While other judges say, well, I really believe this sort of information. So next thing, it's about whether you need to control. You, as providing internet access to someone, need to control the people using your internet access for their property law. Now, if we actually want to have that, then we do have a problem with data security. Because you either need to log everyone's internet access, or you need to check their computers. And then we even enter into the problematic of a very big German law of the secrecy of telecommunications. Now, unfortunately, we're discussing this again after European level court order. There's also the nice problem of interference liability. That is, if I can prove that it wasn't me doing this copyright infringement, then someone will still say, well, you opened it up to this danger. In my opinion, that's complete bullshit. Because the internet is just a network. The internet is not a source of danger as such. Because a source of danger is only true if you can't avoid the danger. But you can avoid danger when actually accessing the internet. We always do generally time and time again. And if I don't have a source of danger, then it isn't my duty to make sure that other people do not commit damages. So the internet should be seen like an infrastructure. Like the telephone, like the autobahn, the highway system. But the access as such is not a source of danger per se. The presumption that if I own the internet access, then I'm also the perpetrator. And this assumes that more than 50% of people live alone, have a closed network, do not ever have guests. But that is obviously not true. Most people share their internet access. So we can't assume that the perpetrator is also the person that has the contract with the ISP, with the internet service provider. And lastly, the thing that kind of makes this a business model that's lucrative, is that you don't really have a risk. Like if you're the one sending the season desist letter, you don't actually have a risk. You don't carry a risk. Because the law says that only if you can show that it was negligent to send out the season desist letter. But being negligent means that you need to know the person that you sent the season desist letter to. So you will never incur any damages yourself. So there's no financial risk for the people who send out these season desist letters. And of course this makes sense if you consider that you have these huge legal offices basing their entire business models on this. And they give zero numbers to their cases that reset each year. And we guess that it's about 10,000 season desist letters they send out a year. And this leads us to estimate that we have about eight digits. There is a total sum of eight digits in all these claims. So it would not make sense for them to have to pay for other people's lawyers. They really want to prevent this from happening. And they found a gold mine, really, because the law limits their expenses to not even dozens of euros. So their business model would vanish immediately if you could prove that these season desist letters had been sent out negligently. Because suddenly they would not only not get paid, they would also have to pay other people's legal expenses. So I think we can do something about this. We created the Abmann-Bandvoter, which roughly translates to season desist answering machine. Yes, we created this tool so that as many people as possible who had received these letters unfairly might be able to defend themselves. You only have usually two weeks to reply to the letter, but not from the date when you received it, but from the date when it was sent out. So, as a lawyer, I'm a lawyer myself and I cannot find a lawyer who might trust within the ten days I've got left to reply to this letter. So to allow more people to defend themselves in court, we created the Abmann-Bandvoter. And we wanted to make it simple and we want you to work on the actual letter itself. So, for instance, tell you about the date of the letter or the serial number in order to get people to think about what they did at that point in time. Which in turn gives them a reason why the season desist letter was sent out unfairly. And the second step next is that we want to start next year to get the people sending out these letters. We want to force them to actually want to force them to put them on the spot. And make sure that they will have to put the sum down a little bit because the amounts that they want is quite unbelievable. So instead of actually just like sending them letters, we want to give them back their cost risk. That is, we want to force them to work in a real legal way to get away from this weird mass industrialized system that actually does not fit the idea of the practice of law that we have. So there's something we skipped just now. The Abmannbeantworter actually works in your own browser. You just put in some stuff so that the person who sent out the season desist letter actually knows your address. And there's a PDF that is produced and you can just send out this PDF. Obviously, you still have to sign it, but then you can just send it via regular post. And this is a pretty free or cost-effective way of doing your first defense. So you've already put the other side on the spot. So the cost that you write down actually only occurs afterwards, which makes this a legally binding way for you to start a new procedure that would then have them pay money. Now, let's leave the law aside a little bit. There's also a political side to this. So we actually also deal with this topic in our free time or privately because we want open and free networks. The collateral damage that we see, which is that the network is actually getting more closed, is something that can't happen. We fight for internet access for everyone, for better technology, for economic reasons, but also for human rights reasons. Now, I can say without internet, I probably would be a different person and I could always have internet access. I need internet access to work, to communicate, to orient myself, to make plans, to inform myself, obviously. And it's impossible because someone else, that is the entertainment industry, that's actually already pretty profitable. And it can't be that because they want to make more profits, I'm losing my elementary human right of internet access. I want this to change and I really want to support people that share their network access. They should be supported by us. They shouldn't have this fear and insecurity and that's why we work. What I really want to say is that I really want the Abmann-Bandwater to become superfluous, to be able to take it offline, because it won't be necessary anymore. Because we think the people sending out these cease and desist letters should actually collect this information by themselves. Because usually when you get these kind of letters from a federal judge, you actually just say, no, this is not true, no, this is not true, you send it back and that's fine. And this is the way it should be here as well. There should be an easy, simple way to do that. And we hope that the customer protection services in Germany will actually be able to push this through. Unfortunately we do not have time for questions anymore. But if you have comments, questions, if you want to discuss tomorrow at 3.30 at the Freifunk Assembly, there's going to be a discussion round. And our lectures will also be there and you can really discuss it there.