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U.K. Anti-Piracy Effort Targets Unlikely Perps

Never played a video game in your life? Have no idea what an Xbox or Wii is? Well watch out! You're just asking to be brought up on charges by a U.K. campaign to crack down on video game piracy.

Such was the case with one elderly couple from Scotland, Gill and Ken Murdoch, who received a letter from Atari's law firm telling them they could pay 500 pounds for their crime of illegally downloading games or face criminal prosecution. "We do not have, and have never had, any computer game or sharing software," said the couple. "We did not even know what 'peer to peer' was until we received the letter."

And the Murdoch's are not the only case. About 70 people seem to have been targeted despite being extremely unlikely to be guilty. Most likely, this is a result of a strategy illegal downloaders uses to lead investigators up a virtual garden path, by inserting random IP addresses of users, some of who may not even know what file sharing is, to the list of people downloading files.

Read the whole story at Techcrunch »

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