My girlfriend got an Abmahnung from Frommer Legal yesterday. Unfortunately her name is on the internet account and she is very law abiding and worried by it. I’m Canadian and the most I’ve ever gotten has been a threatening letter from an ISP in Canada. Obviously, I didn’t know torrenting was so persecuted in Germany or else I would have been more vigilant with a VPN. Anyway , the Abmahnung is representing Warner Brothers and wants me to pay 1000€ for seeding 2 episodes of an HBO show. I contacted one of the many defense firms that specialize against these lawsuits but their fee is 30% of what I save of the “fine”. So the combined minimum(fine and lawyer fee) I could possibly pay with them is 300€. My girlfriend has proof that she wasn’t home that day (a hostel booking from Berlin) but even so the whole thing (Frommel and the defense firms) seems like the epitome of lawful evil to me and I’d rather not support it. They are both just lawyers preying on people foolish enough to not use VPNs with scare tactics. We are planning to move in 6 months anyway (elsewhere in Germany). I did read that these firms generally do (or at least sometimes) sue you in court if you ignore the warnings. I read a couple anecdotes from people that got sued just before 3 years ran out after the first Abmahnung. Can they even sue us if they don’t have our new address? What should I do? Suck it up and pay the defense firm or ignore it?
Being outside of your home is no credible defense, think of scheduled torrenting. Perhaps you could get away with it if multiple people use it with some logs.
So their deal is, to dissuade torrenting with high fines, but of course not everyone can get sued by it, because the court capacity is too low to go after everyone. Which is the reason legislation allows this scamming. Not to forget both lawyer firms get their money like the dirty leeches they are. On the macro scale it is a cartel. A mutual agreement between legislation, IP holders, courts and the two lawyer firms and the government raking in some taxes off that. The only loser is you and the fine has no relationship to the actual damage caused and attempts to cap it at a tenth of that failed.
You will likely need to suck it up and learn the lesson to stronger protect your access and make sure all bindings, killswitches are active while torrenting through a VPN, I like Mullvad.
Otherwise they will sue, if you don’t agree.
Germany is a conservative, backward shithole, so good luck.
1000 EUR is steep though, maybe see if you can negotiate it down to 100-200 and just pay it? Or just ignore it and see if they actually go to court.
It’s an awful situation though. I had O2 there destroy my credit score after I closed my account (which could only be done via fax - lol Germany) and left the country, but they were still trying to settle the final month’s payment of ~20 EUR for over a year.
Since a move is tracked by the „Bürgeramt“ they will find you since this is a jurisdical topic.
About ten years ago, a friend got such letter about 700€ and they argued that the wifi was public (hotspot mode) and they did not know who did that.
Besides, those are the reasons why torrents are nearly dead in Germany as far as i know.
they’re not dead. They’re concentrated in very paranoid private trackers
I just use Transmission in docker and VPN with killswitch. Done.
But Bürgeramt is not allowed to share that information with third parties. It will only do so if they try to push criminal charges. Which they supposedly already did to obtain her name in the first place. If that case is closed (and it will most likely be closed at some point), then they are out of luck.
