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?
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.
Would an ISP be able to tell if a WiFi has a password? I feel like either that or the connected devices might cause issues for them
Unless you use the router they provided, absolutely not. They also wouldn’t be able to tell if you ran additional devices that provide such a hotspot behind their own router.
You might be able to get logs of the MACs of connected devices from the router.
But the real issue is whether the court even gives a shit. Stuff like this doesn’t have a jury trial, it just gets rubber-stamped by some old, conservative judge.
Germany hates technology.
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.