A consortium of 6 games publishers are serving notice on 25,000 alleged game pirates, offering to settle their indiscretions out of court for 300GBP or face a judge.

Atari, Topware Interactive, Reality Pump, Techland and have employed law firm Davenport Lyons to carry out the epic letter writing effort, and will focus their efforts on the first 500 punters who ignore the letters.

Court orders are being filed to require ISPs to hand over the details of file sharers from the IP addresses collected by the companies.

"Our clients were incensed by the level of illegal downloading. In the first 14 days since Topware Interactive released Dream Pinball 3D it sold 800 legitimate copies but was illegally downloaded 12,000 times." Roger Billens, a partner at Davenport Lyons, said "Hopefully people will think twice if they risk being taken to court."

The Times spoke to a source close to the gaming trade body who criticised the and suggested other ways of minimising piracy.

Suing your core audience is famously a tactic of US association RIAA, who serve lawsuits on hundreds of alleged downloaders at time - including those apparently don't have internet connections or computers. RIAA have previously backed down on served suits after producing no evidence of the file sharing activities when the case goes to court. Let's hope such mix ups don't occur here then.

By Jason Cartwright

Comments

You can use BBCode

  1. A Pirate Unregistered 1 year ago

    Man I never knew that more people pirate than buy legally

  2. LC Unregistered 1 year ago

    suing there core audience of 12,000 people when only 800 people actually bought the game is a benefit to them how?

    romanticism them if you like but lets be clear, the developer only makes money if the consumer pays for the game, a core audience of 12k thieves hardly pays the bills. let these thieving bastards work for 2 or 3 years for free and see how they like it in turn.