O2 Porn Sharers Set For Legal Rogering From Ben Dover

Porn pusher Ben Dover has won a court case that will see suspected illegal downloaders of his films threatened with legal action.

The High Court has approved the text of a letter which will be sent out to over 9,000 O2 broadband customers who might have illegally shared adult films made by Ben Dover Productions.

The pornographers won a court order in March, forcing the ISP to disclose details of IP addresses linked to alleged copyright infringement. The company is planning to send the O2 customers letters threatening court action unless a settlement is reached.

However, because of the particularities of the case and the company’s previous experience in “speculative invoicing”, the text of the letters had to be agreed in court.

Deny everything

Ben Dover Productions, owned by Golden Eye International, was founded by British adult actor, director and producer Ben Dover, also known as Lindsay Honey. This is not the first time his company has cracked down on alleged copyright infringement.

In 2009, Ben Dover Productions became involved in a campaign of “speculative invoicing“, where it would send out letters, initially through lawyers, to alleged porn pirates demanding a payment of £700, with potential court action as an alternative.

It was later alleged that the campaign was targeting innocent individuals and that the speculative invoicing relied on the embarrassment of those targeted agreeing to the fine to avoid the threatened court action, regardless of whether they were guilty or not.

In March, Golden Eye went to court in an attempt to obtain the details of over 9,124 IP addresses from internet service provider O2. The High Court ruled that the ISP must hand over their details, but threw out another 12 claims.

The juge also deemed the proposed £700 fine to be “unsupported and unsupportable”, telling the company to individually negotiate a settlement sum with each defendant.

Because IP addresses can be shared, faked and hijacked, they cannot serve as reliable evidence. Hence, the bill payer cannot automatically be assumed to be guilty of any alleged copyright violation, and therefore any claim made by Ben Dover Productions couldn’t move forward unless the recipient of the company’s spectulative invoicing letters admitted their own guilt.

This is why “precise wording of the order and of the letter of claim” had to be decided at a court hearing. Suspected sharers of the X-rated material will be given 28 days to reply after the judge called a 14-day limit requested by Ben Dover “unreasonable”.

“In our first letter we seek to find out more information regarding evidence of an infringement of our copyright,” spokesman Julian Becker told the BBC. “Depending on the response to our letters we will then decide our next action.”

A statement from O2 said: “We are pleased that the court has taken a robust approach and controlled the tone and content of the letter Golden Eye proposes to send to our customers. We are also pleased that the judge acknowledged the unique position we are in, and agreed that we have approached this issue in a reasonable way.”

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