UK Lord Provides Overview of File-Sharing Threat Schemes
In yesterday’s House of Lords debate on the Digital Economy Bill, Lord Lucas provided a rather accurate summing up of the ‘pay up or else’ scheme being targeted at alleged file-sharers in the UK by ACS:Law and Tilly Bailey & Irvine.
Summary of the ACS:Law and now Tilly, Bailey & Irvine schemes to chase alleged file-sharers, as published yesterday by Lord Lucas.
(Video at end of post, should you prefer)
The game works roughly like this. You find an owner of an obscure bit of copyright that is available on the internet, preferably something pornographic and extremely nasty.
You then employ a piece of software whose innards have never been exposed to the public, or tested in a court, to produce allegations that a particular set of IP addresses have made that copyright material available for upload over the internet.
You then take tens of thousand of these cases to court and, using a Norwich Pharmacal order, obtain the details of the relevant subscribers from their internet service providers. You then write them a letter, which has basically three elements to it.
First, it says: “You have committed this transgression of copyright”.
Secondly, it says: “If you force us to take you to court, we will pursue you for a very large sum of money”.
Thirdly, it says: “But we offer you this opportunity to settle for a mere £500 or £800″ – or whatever the figure is – “and we will forget all about the perils of court and the vast sums for which you might otherwise be liable, because basically we are very good people, and all that we are seeking to do is to protect our copyright”.
This scam works because of the impossibility of producing proof against this allegation. How can you prove that you did not do this thing?
You have an internet connection, and they say that it was done over that internet connection. It is no good producing your computer, because you committed the offence using a different computer. It is no good saying that you are a 97 year-old widow and that you hardly know how to use the telephone, let alone the internet, because, nevertheless, you have an internet connection and they say that it was abused.
It is extremely difficult to produce evidence to gainsay this. All you can do is deny it, and one of the things that they say in the letter is, “Don’t bother to deny this without producing evidence that you didn’t do it”.
The result is that a very large people of number pay up, as a result either of the first letter or of the letters that follow. As far as I can discover, despite the tens of thousands of orders that have been granted, the solicitors involved have never taken a seriously contested case to court, because getting money out of people on the basis of the compromise offer is actually what is lucrative.
There may or may not be truth at the root of this, but this is a route for obtaining redress for copyright abuse which has been neglected, and with good reason, by the reputable end of the copyright industry. It produces a great deal of distress and indignation among many thousands of our citizens, and it ought not to be allowed to continue now that we are producing a better and proper route for redress for copyright owners, particularly where we are looking at volume cases-where we are looking at large volumes of infringement. That is exactly what the Bill aims to deal with.
My Amendments 15 and 31 look at a couple of possible ways of dealing with this. We could act on the internet service providers and give them a defence against revealing the details of their subscribers – we could say that either they or a court must be satisfied that a fair and accurate process was being used – or we could give the court the power to say, “No, here is this Act which provides a proper remedy for copyright owners who are suffering from the sort of abuse which is alleged in these letters. Let them use that route because that is fairer for consumers and a fairer basis on which to operate, which is what Parliament has decided, and lay off the techniques which are being used to extract money at present”.
Mostly, to date, one firm has been involved, but now a second firm is getting involved. The news of how lucrative this is has spread. If we do not do something about it, we will have more firms creeping into this business. There is plenty of copyright in unpleasant material. There are plenty of opportunities for these firms to make money.
It is high time that we do something effective to put a stop to it.
I do not mind which of the amendments the Government choose. I suspect that if I was forced to choose between them, I would choose the one put forward by the Liberal Democrats. It might not be perfectly drafted, but if we get it into the Bill now, the Government will have an opportunity to redraft it for Third Reading. But this must not be allowed to continue. I beg to move.
I applaud Lord Lucas for his obvious concern for constituents.
Of course this abuse could be very easily remedied if copyright holders would simply fall in line with the views of the majority of the world’s population and allow non-commercial personal use copying. If personal use copying was legal there would be no threat available to these unscrupulous operators.
Industry allegations that personal use copying results in lost revenue is belied by the record breaking profit being realized in tandem with illegal file sharing. An increasing number of people contend that illegal file sharing serves as a means of promotion which actually enhances commercial sales.
[...] Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com. [...]
“I applaud Lord Lucas for his obvious concern for constituents”
Small note: Lords are appointed or hold their post as a result of hereditary enoblement, and are not elected. They are tied to no constituency, and therefore have no constituents. They (usually) hold the position for life. Therefore they are – in theory – a lot less fickle and corruptible than members of the lower house.
Ths is exactly why the Gaulic ‘guilty until proven innocoent’ approach to internet copyright infringment will not work.
[...] Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com. [...]
[...] Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com. [...]
So that’s where Lord Lucan’s been hiding alll that time!
Oh wait
the cake is a lie
Lord Lucas seems to be one of the few sane people in the government…
[...] Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com. [...]
[...] Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com. [...]
osted the videos for this on the acsflaw1 youtube account
type “acslawscammers” into google for LOTS of info
Thanks Hickster, added it to the post
[...] Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com. [...]
The cake is not a lie.
It is delicious and moist.
http://pulsedmedia.com/clients/aff.php?aff=006
My SeedBox Provider
100Gb Storage, Terabytes of transfer with 1Gbit peaks Seedbox for JUST 9.95 euro per month!
maybe im different because im not english, but whenever someone threatens legal action against me of any sort my first call is to my lawyer. One of the lovely things about the U.S. justice system is that the burden of proof beyond a shadow of a doubt lies with the prosecution…so unless they can can provide irrefutable proof that i personally committed said copyright infringement, I walk away scott free. My next call is back to said threatener, to iquire as when the police will be arriving to arrest me for the crime ive supposedly committed. At the end of the day, I can prove that my ip address changes daily, and i can debug/fdisk/format my hard drive in an instant thereby destroying any record of any copyrighted material having ever been on the computer, as every last sector of the HDD is rewritten to 0…plausibly explained by a computer virus that i was being thourough in removing.
I was just wondering, if I were to receive such a letter, would the letter constitute an slanderous act? If so, wouldn’t it be more prudent to counter-SUE the litigators for slander and ask for millions and billions of dollars as compensation?
If the onus of proof is on me to prove my innocence, wouldn’t the proof of their innocence lie in proving my guilt?