BayTSP Acknowledges Sending Warning Notices by Mistake (Updated)

The American company BayTSP has acknowledged that it accidentally processed warning notices for allegedly unauthorized anime downloaders in France, Japan, and the United States last week, according to a Wednesday report in The New Paper periodical in Singapore. Odex, an anime licensee in Singapore, had asked BayTSP, a firm that deals with online intellectual property, to pursue unauthorized anime downloaders in that country only, and not worldwide.

BayTSP spokesperson Jim Graham said in a joint reply with Odex, "Moving forward, notices relating to Odex-licensed and authorized content will only be sent to Singapore ISPs [Internet service providers] whose subscribers are identified as downloading this content illegally." Odex has not responded to ANN's request for a separate comment.

The two companies have been serving notices to Singaporean Internet users throughout 2007, and some users have spent S$3,000 to S$5,000 (about US$2,000 to US$3,500) to settle the copyright infringement claims outside the courts. The resulting outcry from other users has spread throughout that country's online forums, newspapers, and television news.

Source: DarkMirage

Update: The Odex website's domain address was hacked to redirect to another website on November 22 (Singapore time), and the new website displayed a message from the hacker. Neither the official website nor the hacker's redirected page is currently accessible as of November 21, 7:30 p.m. EST.

Update 2: DarkMirage's blog notes that the hack was not an external domain name system (DNS) hack, but a compromise of Odex's web server itself. Jim Graham identified himself in his message to ANN as "the PR person for Odex."