14 DAY TRIAL // A new anti-piracy tool called "Logistep Data Management Tool" was spotted parked a few days ago on the eparken domain name. Since it was noticed, the tool has been surprisingly taken offline. All the info points to the famous Logistep company that was tracking information on p2p users across Europe.
Logistep is a company that created a riot in the p2p community when many p2p users in several European countries started receiving threatening letters from copyright holders regarding legal action due to copyright infringement. The letters requested the users to pay different sums of money in exchange for not being called to court for sharing and downloading copyrighted information.
Logistep is a so called anti-piracy company that tracks and gathers data about users sharing copyrighted material on p2p networks, which it sells afterwards to copyright owners. The company operated in several countries, but in March its actions were declared illegal in Italy because of privacy laws. They were also banned in Switzerland earlier this year for the same reasons and an official European Union statement noted that IP addresses should be treated as personal information that is subject to privacy laws. Even so, the company still operates in Germany and in the UK, where a lot of users are still called to court by copyright holders using data gathered by Logistep.
The name of the tool hosted on eparken is not the only connection to Logistep. Apparently, the address of the domain?s owner, H?ndelstra?e 25, is also the address of the company?s German branch. The site is still available through Google cache and it offers the copyright owners management features like sorting possible infringers by location and ISP, listing and viewing the bills for payments the users made in response to the letters sent, changing the compensation terms and amount, etc.
A curious thing about the online tool is that it was developed using WYSIWYG Web Builder, a website building tool mostly addressed to novice web publishers who lack advanced programming skills. This is strange and unprofessional for a company that handles such sensitive data which is then used to pursue legal actions against individuals. It surely raises suspicions about how the rest of their tracking tools were developed and on their accuracy.