Thank You Spiceskull and Thank You gh2008 for your help. If anything else happens referring to this case I'll let you know. Thanks again to both of you.

I've had a read, and found it very informative, thanks. I think my next letter to Davenport Lyons, if there is one, will be just to say, Stop harassing me, or else I'll be reporting you to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Yes, that's it, same game, same solicitors. After looking at your link and following other links, I came across this, taken from The Register: In most European countries, including the UK, copyright infringement is only a criminal offence when conducted on a commercial scale. Most individual file-sharing would be unlikely to count as a criminal offence. Would this apply to my case? As I can only see the game being downloaded for personal use.

Thanks for that, it's something I'd not thought of. I have written to the solicitors repeating that I was not at the address at the time of the offence and stating that the people there were responsible for the offence. As for them not contacting me earlier, it is possible that they wrote to my old address as the offence took place on the 26/07/2007. The first I heard of it was when my estranged wife sent me the letter asking for the money, that was dated 26/02/2008, I received it in March.

After reading through the letter, if I understand it correctly, the £900 is for compensation or possibly an out of court settlement. It's made up of compensation, my then ISP's admin costs (and legal costs). There is a long list of the things that they have done to incur the costs, in short: Damages for loss of sales. Obtaining evidence Writing to the ISP for my details Preparing witness statements. Serving the application order for a disclosure order on the ISP Attending court to apply for the order Drawing up the order Sending the order the the ISP Ensuring the ISP complies with the order Corresponding with me It says "Our client is prepared to give you the opportunity to avoid legal action....", presumably by paying this sum. I don't know how the downloader found out about the game, as I said, I wasn't there. The solicitors say that they act for Reality Pump Sp.zoo, the owner of the rights to the game.

The line was in my name, as soon as I found out about the download, I cancelled the account. I wrote to the solicitors telling them that I no longer lived at that address and hadn't done for four weeks before the download. I even sent proof of my change of address. The £900 was a fine for downloading the game, but now they want to take me to court and add the court costs on top of that. There is no way I can pay this sort of money as I am living on government benefits, due to ill health.

Can I be held responsible for an illegally downloaded computer game that occurred four weeks after I left my old address (abusive marriage) and moved half way across the country to live with friends? To add to this, the solicitors who are chasing me for payment of £900+ have accidentally sent me a letter on the same subject addressed to a complete stranger. Is this a breach of his privacy/the Data Protection Act? They are threatening to take me to court: as my sole income is incapacity benefit/income support, can I be made to pay for something that I feel I'm not responsible for? I would appreciate any advice you could give me.

Hi all, I'm Adam1, this is my first post, so I'm a newby. I've come here to learn and hopefully to be able to help someone in the future.