"The ESPC says they are just following what the music industry has been doing to those who download copyrighted music," says the buyer of the bird designs. "But I wasn't sharing or distributing these designs to others. I simply paid for a CD on eBay - nothing popped up and said 'hey, you're making an illegal purchase.' I still don't know if it was. If a store sells what appears to be brandname purses that are actually knockoffs, would it be OK to go after the unknowing buyers and demand a $300.00 payment from them?"
That does seem to be what the ESPC is saying. It's a pretty scary concept when you consider the growing frequency of all manner of intellectual property lawsuits and the fact that even the biggest companies sometimes lose those cases. Does that make all their customers criminals?
In the meantime, though, hundreds or maybe thousands of recipients of the ESPC letters have to figure out whether they should pay up or not, and $300 is by no means a "nominal monetary sum" for some of them. "I'm 64 years old, retired due to loss of my job of 25 years after the company downsized, and am now collecting Social Security," the flower CD buyer says. "If you can do anything to help the plight of the aging grannies like me caught up in this mess, we would appreciate it. If not I guess I will give up embroidering completely and bake cookies. Although I suppose there might be a cookie mafia out there somewhere too."
Well, I think the main thing I can do to aid the recipients of these letters is to shed as much light as I can on the situation. Tomorrow I'll post what I've been able to find out so far about the ESPC's campaign, including the question of just where the ESPC is getting its information about these buyers' eBay purchases.
Read and post comments about this story here.
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