And I still want to know whether, if my friend of friend became aggressive they would have a claim against Sky. The 2006 EU Data Retention Directive, which Sky apparently claims to be working to, states that data should be retained for a maximum of 2 years, and yet Sky has passed on information, which may or may not be correct, from well over 2 years ago.
Sorry to follow up my own post, but I've now looked at the Directive, and it looks as though Sky has broken the law. The alleged IP address allocation was for the date of April 2013 and the Sky letter was dated July 2015. See the first and last paragraphs below:
"Article 6
Periods of retention
Member States shall ensure that the categories of data specified in Article 5 are retained for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years from the date of the communication.
Article 7
Data protection and data security
Without prejudice to the provisions adopted pursuant to Directive
95/46/EC and Directive 2002/58/EC, each Member State shall ensure that providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of a public communications network respect, as a minimum, the following data security principles with respect to data retained in accordance with this Directive:
(a)
the retained data shall be of the same quality and subject to the same security and protection as those data on the network;
(b)
the data shall be subject to appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the data against accidental or unlawful destruction, accidental loss or alteration, or unauthorised or unlawful storage, processing, access or disclosure;
(c)
the data shall be subject to appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure that they can be accessed by specially authorised personnel only;
and
(d)
the data, except those that have been accessed and preserved, shall be destroyed at the end of the period of retention."
Well, IANAL, but I would have thought that an alleged, disputed and unprovable breach of copyright based on data that was illegally held and that did not incriminate the person named in the data would not be a sensible place from which to start any legal action or threat.
We have a few more days to decide whether they should just bin the letters or respond. I'd be tempted to respond quite aggressively to Sky and copy in the dodgy law firm/copyright purchaser, but it might be interesting to take all this along to the local CAB (who are suggested by Sky) and see what they advise.
I'm grateful for the pointers in this thread to the other reports about this.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.