Woman made example of – fined £16,000 for illegally downloading a game
Poor old Isabella Barwinska just wanted to have a bit of fun playing pinball on her PC with her friends, but she’s ended up with a £16k fine after being tracked down via the P2P network she used.
Isabella unwisely chose to nick a copy of Pinball Dreams 3D off the internet, no doubt attracted by its wide variety of tables and realistic arcade gameplay! But she was rumbled, and recently ordered to pay damages of £6,086.56 and costs of £10,000 to the game’s maker Topware Interactive. Which is rather more than it would’ve cost to fish a copy out of a local bargain bucket, where we’d imagine it could be had for as little as £2.99.
The prosecution would appear to be a crackdown launched solely by Topware, rather than being some industry-wide move to attack game pirates – the company is apparently pursuing similar actions against 100 other people who it believes have nicked its games online.
(Via Scandal Today)
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