German Law Firm: Redtube a 'Test Case' For More End-user Fines

GERMANY—In the aftermath of increased media attention regarding letters it has already sent to tens of thousands of German users of the porn tube site Redtube, seeking fines of €250 (US$344) per video for the alleged crime of accessing stolen content by way of the streamed porn, law firm Urmann & Colleagues (U&C) has told a German paper that they have every intention of employing the same legal tactic with other websites and the people who use them. “We have been looking into different sites and therefore I anticipate sending letters to users of those portals in the coming months,” firm head Thomas Urmann told Die Welt on Sonntag. According to The Local, Urmann "explained that it no longer made sense to try to fine people for using file sharing sites, which are illegal, because users have become aware they are illegal, and have moved to streaming." That said, the legal tactic being employed by Urmann remains controversial even in Germany, where at least one copyright lawyer, Christian Solmecke, is convinced that there is "no legal basis" for the fines, and is fielding "thousands of calls" from people contacting him for advice. "Most of them remember having accessed RedTube.com in the past, though none of them had very clear recollections about the titles and storylines of the films they had watched," he told The Guardian. That confusion about what they watched describes the difference between using file sharing technology like BitTorrent and going to a tube site to passively watch what is offered. According to Solmecke, the Cologne state court that handed out the IP addresses to U+C law firm was also probably confused about the difference, a confusion the law firm appears all too willing to exploit. Indeed, even in the States the difference between watching content on a tube site and acquiring it via BitTorrent can be equally confusing. In an article in Forbes published today, writer Tim Worsall notes that the "legal ruse [U & C] are using actually sounds reasonable enough to me," citing the historic ability of streaming sites to "circumvent copyright law." While that circumvention has been a very real problem on either side of The Pond, extrapolating the legal ruse to end-users of streaming content ignores the fact that tube sites contain both legitimate and illegal content, and gain whatever "safe harbor" status they have by asserting that they do not know which is which until someone files a DMCA notice with them. What that means is that an end-user can never know for sure if the clip they are watching has been legally uploaded to the site or not. In that sense, the German letters are nothing like the ones sent by Prenda Law, which Worsall references in his Forbes piece. In another as worrisome sense, of course, they are very similar to the ones Prenda sent to thousands of individuals in the United States in a legal scheme that over time earned them the enduring indignation of an increasing number of judges.