I agree that “whois” information is the main source of site ownership information.
While we may choose to keep our “whois” information “private”, it’s well known that companies such as Domaintools ignore privacy laws and make such information available regardless. They’ve made a business out of serving the infringement business.
Some people choose to deliberately register incorrect whois information for their site.
ICANN might send notice and later suspend domains that have such incorrect info, but issues of faulty contact info aren’t policed very well.
Indeed, email is probably the worst method to notify somebody of something, second only to telephone because there’s plausible deniability.
Spam filters weed out threatening letters immediately. Have you checked your spam box lately? I haven’t.
Many email servers no longer send a notice to the originator if an email is undeliverable.
So, there’s no sure proof of delivery, or proof that the recipient has read the email if it is delivered successfully.
If you receive demand letters by email, it’s a sure sign that they don’t have any other way to contact you.
You may decide to “lay low” in such an instance.
Lawsuits are actually pretty rare in reality.
But, people talk about it because it’s really the only means of actual ‘enforcement’, and without it any payment made is, in fact, voluntary.
Even if a lawyer sends a demand letter to somebody, I really don’t consider this as an indication that an actual legal process has been initiated.
Note that even if you have corresponded informally with somebody about a demand letter in the past, this in itself doesn’t mean that they’d have any proof to show that you should have been aware of an impending lawsuit in the future.
Proper papers must be delivered according to the laws in order to prove that you have been “served” proper notice of a lawsuit.
In the actual event of a lawsuit, the use of a “process server” to serve documents upon a defendant is the “gold standard” of proof that a litigant has received legal papers.
There’s other methods, such as registered mail, courier, etc. But these are weaker methods.
However, email has been used as a method of last resort (and even Facebook) to deliver “notice”.
How could that work? Well, if you were served a lawsuit through email for example, then you replied “yeah, but I removed the photos”, that may be sufficient proof of “service” in some places because it’s obvious that you read the document.
This is usually employed in addition to other methods of contact in order to build a case to show that the defendant is aware of the suit.
But, again lawsuits are a rare occurrence. But, It never hurts to be a more “difficult” case in order to make an adversary move on to easier targets, though.
S.G.
Topic: How they find you... (Read 10048 times)