Woman fine £16000 for illegal game sharing

A woman has been ordered to pay £16,000 in a landmark case over illegal file sharing.

The unnamed lady is among the first to be taken to court in the UK by computer game manufacturers seeking to protect their copyright.

She was ordered to pay more than £6,000 in damages and £10,000 towards legal fees for Topware Interactive, owner of the computer game Dream Pinball 3D.

And she's not alone - there are currently civil proceedings against 100 people suspected of illegally uploading games from this manufacturer.

If will send a shiver up the spine of many a file sharing addict, hitherto swopping games, music and films with abandon and seemingly no sanction.

Internet Service Providers such as Virgin have also recently been getting in on the act sending letters to people who have been illegally downloading large amounts of music, asking them nicely to desist.

For one thing I believe PC owners are somewhat shooting themselves in the foot - piracy has always gone on but it's incredibly widespread at present.

People complain that games are simply 'ports' from consoles - but you can hardly blame games manufacturers for putting more effort in on, say the XBox 360 release, if the PC version is copied thousands of times within days of release.

For example Topware say Dream Pinball 3D was shared 16,000 times in the first 14 days.

Some six million people are thought to engage in illegal file-sharing each year in the UK.

Codemasters, based at Southam in the Midlands has seen the extent of the problem - recently chairman Chris Deering said just three out of ten games recover their development and marketing costs.

So if you want proper games to be put out on the PC, I suggest you buy a retail copy.

Of course, this particular case is vexing because Dream Pinball 3D is, well, rubbish. One online review included the lines 'a poor approximation of what real pinball feels like', 'when the camera pans out everything is jaggy and messy', and 'a crippled version of pinball. The "physics" don't feel real at all'.

So there's another lesson - if you're going to be fined thousands for illegally downloading a game - at least make it a decent one!