It’s one thing if your friends, family, and neighbours find out that you’ve been doing some torrenting. It’s a bit worse if they find out what kind of porn you like. Unluckily for horn-dog pirates everywhere, a new “pay-up-now” letter that’s going around pretty explicitly threatens to go around telling people exactly that.
This tactic isn’t exactly new. For a while, copyright holders have been confronting pirates and suggesting that maybe they should just pay a settlement if they don’t want to be explicitly and publicly named in a suit regarding [insert weird fetish here] pornography. But a letter from the “Anti-Piracy Law Group,” has gotten a little more specific with its threats.
TorrentFreak got ahold of a copy of the letter, and points out this lovely passage:
The purpose of this step is to gather evidence about who used your internet account to steal from our client. The list of possible suspects includes you, members of your household, your neighbours (if you maintain an open Wi-Fi connection) and anyone who might have visited your house. In the coming days we will contact these individuals to investigate whether they have any knowledge of the acts described in my client’s prior letter.
Ostensibly, the goal here is to make sure that it was in fact you who was pirating all that embarrassing pornographic goodness, but it’s pretty easy to see the blackmail-flavoured threat that’s just barely underneath the surface. The letter goes on to mention that if you are going to fight this, everything on your home and work computer (like search history) is relevant to the case, so the court could hit you with serious penalties if you try to destroy it.
Of course, all this can be avoided if you’ll just offer up a few thousand dollars for an out-of-court settlement alongside a tacit admission of guilt. A small price to pay to keep your habits a secret from the kids and the Joneses, perhaps even if you’re innocent? That’s what they’re counting on. [TorrentFreak]