>I'd be interested to know what would have happened if the father sent photocopies of the receipts for the music that they bought the next day - I like to think that would have been enough to call off the lawyers but I understand that it probably isn't.

Reading the guy's original rant (in Finnish) on Facebook[1], I can tell you that he actually did do that. He sent a picture of the CD and the receipt to the lawyer and explained the whole situation to him. He didn't hear back from the lawyer after that, and assumed that he had decided to back out (because really, it'd make sense). Fast-forward to almost a year later and the police show up on his door to confiscate the laptop.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/aki.w.nylund/posts/1015113904124507... (though obviously this won't be of much use to anyone who doesn't understand Finnish)

EDIT: I decided to translate some relevant parts of the Facebook post. I initially thought of translating the whole thing, but frankly the original text is rather badly written, which makes it pretty painful to translate.

Okay then, what follows will be a long and exhaustive tale in regards to my earlier status post.

Everything started about a year ago - my daughter asked where she could listen to some of the songs from the latest album of her favorite artist Chisu, since she hadn't saved up enough money to buy the album yet (but her friends at school already had it, apparently).

It was a Saturday evening and I was leaving for work, slightly behind the schedule as usual, so I quickly showed a couple different search engines that my daughter could use and told what keywords to look for. The next day my daughter told me she did find some songs, but that they "didn't work". And apparently she had managed to even "download" something, but that only resulted in errors on the computer screen. I couldn't keep watching all this pain pour out from my little girl, so we marched to the closest supermarket and I bought her the CD from this top Finnish artist.

Fast-forward to Spring and I get an e-mail from some attorney, claiming that I had illegally distributed a musical record on The Pirate Bay. As a result, I'd have to pay 600€ (SIX HUNDRED EUROS) in charges to a specified account (the e-mail actually had an account number in it?!) and sign an NDA so that I wouldn't be able to tell anyone (or anything) about these charges or the reason for them. The first impression I had was that this had to be some sort of Nigerian prince -type scam, but after checking the attachments and looking up the "attorney's" background, I fired a quick e-mail back that basically said "What in the fuck is this thing about?"

Unfortunately, the answer didn't tell me anything new - just repeated the same "pay 600€ and sign the NDA, or this will go to court" from the first mail. After that, I realized that this was probably connected to my daughter googling Chisu and managing to download some songs (that didn't work) and it was probably some kind of "trap" set up by a record label, my ISP and the police. I sent another e-mail to the attorney detailing the likely chain of events that could have happened here and attached two pictures along with it: one of the purchased CD and another of two concert tickets for a Chisu gig that I was going to attend with my daughter.

[...]

When I didn't hear any answer from the lawyer, I figured that even he must have some common sense and had decided to drop the case in favor of some "real" criminal deals.