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Deutsch: Litauisches Gericht urteilt zugunsten eines BitTorrent-Nutzers
A Lithuanian District Court has recently ruled against the anti-piracy organisation LANVA in a case against a user of the BitTorrent tracker LinkoManija.net.
Last year, LANVA accused 106 users of LinkoManija.net of sharing Windows 7 Ultimate and brought one of them to court, which has now decided in favour of the defendant due to faulty evidence. The evidence gathered by LANVA consisted of a screenshot of a list of peers as available on uTorrent and the court considered uTorrent was not a certified evidence gathering tool.
As none of parties involved was authorised for such an investigation and therefore the judge stated that LANVA had no right to collect and use the gathered information. The court also ruled that the techniques for such kind of evidence had to be approved prior to the use.
Aside from this case, LANVA together with Microsoft sued the alleged operator of LinkoManija.net in January 2010 demanding about 32 million euro from the defendant Kestas Ermanas and his company for facilitating the illegal distribution of Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007.
The case is ongoing and the assets of Kestas Ermanas and his company had been seized and the associated bank accounts frozen, but the website is functional. It appears however that the defendant had operated the site only until the end of 2009. Kestas also stated that Microsoft had never sent them a proper takedown request. "We informed them that we wanted to cooperate with them, they just had to give us the links to the infringing torrent files," said Kestas who added that "they never wrote back to us."
Following the recent outcome of LANVA case, it is doubtful whether the second case would be successful either. LANVA can appeal the decision but even if they do it, the case will be heard in about a year's time.
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