More on the world of copyright infringement and threats to consumers. On January 26th 2010 Hansard records show a lively debate in the House of Lords concerning the Digital Economy Bill amendments. One of the hot issues in that was the bullying methods of copyright holders vis-à-vis internet consumers. Here is what Lord Lucas had to say about the practice of sending threatening letters to consumers asking them to cough up a payment in lieu of facing exorbitant charges in court defending themselves:
I had a very helpful letter this morning from ACS:Law Solicitors which, combined with what the Ministers were saying on the last occasion we discussed this, leads me to a greater understanding of their reluctance to deal with the practices that ACS:Law Solicitors is pursuing. They expect these practices to become standard. They expect this to be the way that our citizens will be treated. If people fall foul of this Bill, they will have a couple of warning letters, but after that they will get a typical ACS:Law Solicitors standard letter saying, “Pay us £500 or we will take you to court”. If they do not pay the £500, they will end up in court, there will be technical evidence against them, and they will have no ability to provide a technical defence. That is the difficulty that people faced with ACS:Law Solicitors have at the moment. There is this inequality of arms. They are in a civil court, with a 50:50 balance-of-probability judgment, and must contemplate risking thousands of pounds in mounting a defence when it is not easy to do that.
The problem in the UK was, for a long time that law firms like ACS:Law would offer their services to rightsholders who believed that they were victims of internet piracy and then would proceed to send letters to persons identified by their IP in which they threatened to take them to court unless they paid a sum of money up front.
You can read more about the “legal blackmail” here in Ars Tecnica. The constant pressure in Malta on dreambox owners is not far from this kind of reality. In this case private companies are building up the pressure on law enforcers to turn practically one third of the tv viewing public into instant criminals. They hope to get most of the satellite viewers to desist from their “illegal activity” by creating an atmosphere of worry and terror. We look forward to see how far up the path they are willing to go.
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- ACS:Law: When bad things happen to bad people (technollama.co.uk)
- Anti-Piracy Scheme “A Scam & Legal Blackmail” Say UK Lords (torrentfreak.com)
- Feature: The “legal blackmail” business: inside a P2P settlement factory (arstechnica.com)
- Scareware solicitors sent to regulator (go.theregister.com)
- Law firm could face £500,000 fine over data breach (guardian.co.uk)
- Law firm which pursued ‘file sharers’ being investigated over email leak (guardian.co.uk)
- UK government hands £500M copyright enforcement and censorship tab to nation’s Internet users (boingboing.net)
- Legal blackmail: comprehensive look at tactics of copyright bounty-hunters (boingboing.net)
- Lawyers rally support for illegal file sharing accused (computeractive.co.uk)
