As readers will be aware, last year the company succeeding in spilling the details of around 6,000 Internet subscribers onto an unprotected web page following a Denial of Service attack carried out by Anonymous.

“This case proves that a company’s failure to keep information secure can have disastrous consequences. Sensitive personal details relating to thousands of people were made available for download to a worldwide audience and will have caused them embarrassment and considerable distress,” said Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham.

“The security measures ACS Law had in place were barely fit for purpose in a person’s home environment, let alone a business handling such sensitive details.”

The ICO revealed that Crossley did not obtain professional advice when setting up his systems, didn’t operate a firewall and used a web-hosting package intended for domestic users.

So how much, exactly, will be Crossley expected to pay for this complete failure to live up to his obligations? According to Graham, ACS:Law’s fine would have been £200,000 given the severity of their conduct, but there are mitigating circumstances.

“Penalties are a tool for achieving compliance with the law and, as set out in our criteria, we take people’s circumstances and their ability to pay into account,” Graham continued.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that Crossley is insisting he’s broke, so he can’t pay. Which is interesting.

PC Pro are reporting that they asked the ICO if they had taken steps to verify Crossley’s financial status but are yet to receive a response. Maybe the following will help.

Only last year Crossley was boasting of being a resident of Monaco and you need a few quid knocking around to achieve that. His taste in expensive cars has been well documented too. But there’s more.

Some time ago TorrentFreak acquired a copy of a document dated October 2010 where Crossley swore to a court that he had a “thriving and successful law firm” (this is after the data breach) that had collected more than £1.5 million in settlements. We know, from recent court proceedings, that he was collecting 65% of money recovered. You can do the math.

In the document Crossley also swore to jointly owning a £750,000 home and having £200,000 of work in progress at ACS:Law, yet now we are expected to believe that Crossley can only afford to pay £1,000 in fines.

That’s equivalent to just two of the £500 settlements he expected Internet users to cough up for the alleged sharing of a single 3rd rate movie, based on claims that were so weak that neither he nor his clients were prepared to see them through to conclusion in court. Yet he collected these settlements from thousands.

Disappointing decision by the ICO? You bet.

Source: ACS:Law Pleads Poverty, Gets Tiny Fine For Data Breach

The decision follows the law firm’s campaign of threats against individuals accused of sharing movies, many of them pornographic, on BitTorrent networks.

Recipients of ACS:Law letters were told to pay cash settlements of around £500 or face being taken to court by Media C.A.T, a client of ACS:Law. While many resisted, thousands paid up. ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, Media C.A.T and other clients together collected around £1.5m in the scheme.

Always accused of not wanting to bring any cases to court, in the end ACS:Law was effectively forced to deal with 27 cases they had filed earlier with the Patents County Court in London. Few observers were surprised when they tried to abandon them all at the 11th hour.

However, the defendants and their lawyers had run up significant bills dealing with Crossley’s accusations. They called for ACS:Law and Media C.A.T to pay “wasted costs”, something that Judge Birss has been considering since the cases were dismissed last month and has ruled on today.

“I am quite satisfied to the standard necessary for this stage of a wasted costs application that Mr Crossley is responsible for the Basic Agreements [the licence agreements between Media CAT and original copyright holders] and has thereby acted in breach of the Solicitors Rule 2.04,” said Judge Birss, as reported by Ralli Solicitors, a law firm in court today representing some of the defendants.

“In my judgment the combination of Mr Crossley’s revenue sharing arrangements and his service of the Notices of Discontinuance serves to illustrate the dangers of such a revenue sharing arrangement and has, prima facie, brought the legal profession into disrepute. It may be better placed under the revenue sharing heading in this judgment but it is, prima facie, improper conduct in any event,” Birss added.

The language being used by Birss will undoubtedly damage Crossley’s prospects of continuing his career in the legal profession. Having your conduct described by a senior judge as both “chaotic and lamentable” and “amateurish and slipshod” is damning.

Both ACS:Law and Media C.A.T, who were previously accused by Judge Birss of doing everything they could “to avoid judicial scrutiny”, pulled their departing stunt at the end of January 2011, by quietly closing down both of their businesses.

Source: Senior Judge Slams File-Sharing Law Firm, Orders Costs Payout

The decision follows the law firm’s campaign of threats against individuals accused of sharing movies, many of them pornographic, on BitTorrent networks.

Recipients of ACS:Law letters were told to pay cash settlements of around £500 or face being taken to court by Media C.A.T, a client of ACS:Law. While many resisted, thousands paid up. ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, Media C.A.T and other clients together collected around £1.5m in the scheme.

Always accused of not wanting to bring any cases to court, in the end ACS:Law was effectively forced to deal with 27 cases they had filed earlier with the Patents County Court in London. Few observers were surprised when they tried to abandon them all at the 11th hour.

However, the defendants and their lawyers had run up significant bills dealing with Crossley’s accusations. They called for ACS:Law and Media C.A.T to pay “wasted costs”, something that Judge Birss has been considering since the cases were dismissed last month and has ruled on today.

“I am quite satisfied to the standard necessary for this stage of a wasted costs application that Mr Crossley is responsible for the Basic Agreements [the licence agreements between Media CAT and original copyright holders] and has thereby acted in breach of the Solicitors Rule 2.04,” said Judge Birss, as reported by Ralli Solicitors, a law firm in court today representing some of the defendants.

“In my judgment the combination of Mr Crossley’s revenue sharing arrangements and his service of the Notices of Discontinuance serves to illustrate the dangers of such a revenue sharing arrangement and has, prima facie, brought the legal profession into disrepute. It may be better placed under the revenue sharing heading in this judgment but it is, prima facie, improper conduct in any event,” Birss added.

The language being used by Birss will undoubtedly damage Crossley’s prospects of continuing his career in the legal profession. Having your conduct described by a senior judge as both “chaotic and lamentable” and “amateurish and slipshod” is damning.

Both ACS:Law and Media C.A.T, who were previously accused by Judge Birss of doing everything they could “to avoid judicial scrutiny”, pulled their departing stunt at the end of January 2011, by quietly closing down both of their businesses.

Source: Senior Judge Slams File-Sharing Law Firm, Orders Costs Payout

Davenport Lyons (DL), the law firm which pioneered the “pay-up-or-else” scheme in the UK, are facing disciplinary proceedings by the Solicitors Regulation Authority on allegations of misconduct. Knowing full well that they cannot make the same mistakes as DL, ACS:Law are trying to be a little more careful in the way they try to force money out of letter recipients.

According to ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, his company does not state that the people they send their letters to are guilty of anything, only that their connection has been used to infringe. He also goes on to say that his letters are merely an offer to settle any potential legal case in the future and people aren’t obliged to pay anything.

This is great news. Since Crossley admits he can’t prove the letter recipient has committed any infringement, that same recipient is under no obligation to pay a dime. So it’s all finished there then? Not a chance, ACS:Law don’t give up so easily.

Yesterday consumer magazine Which? reported on the questionnaires being sent out by ACS:Law. The law firm sends these out once people have written to them denying they did anything wrong. All they are designed to do is to enable the letter recipient to incriminate themselves or, in some cases, other people.

The advice from Deborah Prince, Which?’s head of legal affairs, is that people are under no obligation to fill in these questionnaires. These bits of paper simply amount to a fishing trip by a law firm clutching at straws in the face of a recipient who won’t be bullied and won’t pay up.

But these questionnaires aren’t new – ACS:Law have been sending these out for some time. Just after we published consumer group Being Threatened’s guide to dealing with letters from the lawyers back in January, they added a bonus section.

The Speculative Invoicing Handbook Bonus Chapter: Not replying to a questionnaire is available for download here and really shows these questionnaires for what they are.

“If you’ve ‘replied and denied’ and now received a letter from a law firm requesting further information: Congratulations! This kind of mailing demonstrates that at present they don’t have enough information to build a case against you,” explains the guide.

“Your straight denial has left them out in the cold. Now they’re hoping you’ll be kind enough to fabricate a case against yourself (or maybe someone else) on their behalf. Perhaps you’ll be good enough to suggest your own grandmother who surfs eBay for wool supplies when she pops over on Sundays? Maybe your younger brother, or your flatmate? Thankfully you’re not as stupid as they’d believe.”

Yet despite the wealth of information available to anyone with a web browser and a rudimentary grasp of Google, people continue to give ACS:Law money. In the first 11 months of their scheme they collected an amazing £1,000,000 from these letters. How many cases went to court? Zero.

One day people will see this cash cow for what it is and stop feeding it. Hopefully that will be before we see our first flying pig.

Copies of the questionnaire can be found here.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Sullivan, who previously owned the national newspapers the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport and is the current joint-chairman of West Ham United football club, is probably better known as one of the country’s most famous pornographers.

According to information provided to TorrentFreak and by BeingThreatened.com, a consumer group set up to assist those wrongfully accused of infringement by ACS:Law and other lawyers, a shop owned by one of Sullivan’s companies has become an unlikely victim in the ongoing and hugely controversial anti-filesharing scheme.

Following a request under the Freedom of Information Act, it has been revealed that Sullivan-owned Darker Enterprises Ltd, the company behind the Private chain of sex shops and pornographic outfit Sheptonhurst, applied earlier this year to have one of its sex shop licenses renewed.

“The sex shops operated by the chain must legally be licensed,” explains BeingThreatened spokesman James Bench. “This license must be renewed annually, the criteria are stringent and objections may be submitted by any member of the public based on the grounds set out in Schedule 3 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982.”

But the application didn’t go smoothly. An objection to the granting of the license was received citing several potential grounds for refusal. The first claim stated there had been an attempt to hide the real owners of the applicants in order to obtain a license. The second was that the Private Shops website previously supplied restricted videos via mail contrary to law, but it is the third element that will be of most interest to readers.

“Following the receipt by one north-west council of one such objection – which made direct reference to the scheme, describing it as one which ‘…bullies innocent individuals in respect of alleged file sharing of pornography…’ – Darker Enterprises has withdrawn their renewal application, closed the shop and left the town,” explains Bench.

Darker Enterprises didn’t go quietly though. The company has labeled the objection as “part of a National campaign which is based on half-truth and innuendo”.

“Sheptonhurst Ltd., which is a subsidiary of Darker Enterprises Ltd., was approached, along with a number of companies in the adult film industry, by a firm of solicitors offering to assist in tackling the problem of internet sharing of R18 [videos] on a no-win no-fee basis,” said the company on its connections with ACS:Law.

“There had been concerns for some time not only because of copyright infringement but also because of the likely detrimental effects of uncontrolled circulation of material that should be subject to controls,” they continued.

“The rights of enforcement were assigned to the solicitors concerned by a number of distributors. Once again, this decision was taken at an operational level. David Sullivan did not take part in this decision and, at the time of writing, is not even aware of it,” they added.

But it seems that although only a single shop has been affected at this point, the situation has the potential to snowball.

“The firm has to renew over a hundred licenses annually – a considerable liability. While they may feel that they have already been subject to a national campaign, the scope of their commercial vulnerability may yet become apparent,” explains BeingThreatened’s James Bench.

“In just the next two months license renewals are due in a further dozen towns including Stoke, Newport, Halifax, Bedford, Brent, Stevenage, Woking, Doncaster, Carlisle, Bolton, Brighton and Southampton,” he concludes.

Whether other complaints against those license renewals will be made on similar grounds is yet to be seen, but the huge scale of the scheme operated by ACS:Law means that they have made many thousands of enemies, of which many hundreds have already mobilized against them with endless complaints to a wide range of authorities.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Notably, the German-based outfit refused to tell the BBC the names of its clients, but this is to be expected. Part of the DigiProtect service is to shield the brand image of its clients by taking all the adverse publicity these campaigns generate by taking it on their own chin. However, despite putting themselves front and center for criticism, it doesn’t actually play out like that.

It is ACS:Law, the tiny one-lawyer UK law firm who do the ‘dirty work’ for DigiProtect, which gets all the attention. Unlike lawyers Davenport Lyons and more recently Tilly Bailey & Irvine who withdrew from this business due to the damage it was causing to their reputations, ACS:Law don’t care about the negative publicity. Considering the huge amounts of money they’re bringing in, some might consider their defiance understandable.

But perhaps ACS:Law should stop for a moment and think about the damage being done to the reputation of their profession and to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA), the body charged with the task of ensuring the law business in the UK isn’t brought into disrepute. As we will now reveal, the toll is considerable.

During the debates about the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, repeated mentions were made that the appropriate route of complaint for recipients of demands relating to filesharing accusations is via complaints to the appropriate legal authorities. Comments along these lines were made by Lord Young, despite his department having received a number of complaints from individuals stating they had exhausted all their options.

It was therefore surprising that the following comment was made on record during these debates: (Lord Young – 20 Jan 10)

“The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said that these actions are appalling and unacceptable, but nobody has referred them to any of the regulatory bodies. I find that strange. We are saying that we have had thousands of these cases yet nobody has said that this law firm is acting in a totally unacceptable way. I should have thought that the legal regulatory bodies would by now have been involved and I am puzzled why they have not been.”

As a result of this claim, which he knew to be untrue, John Fletcher (working with Beingthreatened.com) discovered that the total number of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) could be found using a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which the SRA voluntarily honor.

An FOIA request was made and the results are astonishing.

By the end of December 2009, a full month before Lord Young claimed “nobody had referred [ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons] to the regulatory bodies”, more than 247 individual complaints had in fact been made to the SRA.

At the answering of the FOIA request, nearly 300 complaints had been made against a total of three law firms. Of these, 14 complaints are recorded as having been resolved in one case file, which would have pertained to Davenport Lyons and 3 complaints at the time of the request were against Tilly Bailey and Irvine. So what about the rest?

As of 22 March 2010, a staggering 283 of these complaints related to the activities of ACS:Law.

Together, the individual complaints made against mainly ACS:Law (and to a much lesser extent Tilly Bailey & Irvine and Davenport Lyons) over the past two years dwarfs the levels of SRA complaints relating to any other area of intellectual property law in the UK.

Furthermore, in September 2009, complaints against ACS:Law topped out at over 16% of the 500 complaints made in total to the SRA for the whole month.

But there is a serious problem. The SRA is there to serve the public by ensuring that disreputable lawyers are quickly kept in check, and to this end they have to adhere to timeliness targets.

The information published by the Office of the Legal Services Complaint Commissioner (OLSCC) in their annual report has set the following timeliness targets for the SRA and the Legal Complaints Service (LCS):

Timeliness Target T1 – 6 Month Closures: The Legal Complaints Service to investigate and conclude at least 87% of cases within 6 months of receipt.

Timeliness Target T2 – 12 Month Closures: The Legal Complaints Service to investigate and conclude 100% of cases within 12 months, apart from in exceptional circumstances.

The Freedom of Information request referred to above discovered that of the 14 complaints made regarding the activity of Davenport Lyons:

· Only 7% of cases were closed within 6 months of receipt (against the target of 87%).

· 29% of cases were closed within 12 months of receipt.

This means that a huge 64% of all complaints failed to meet targets T1 and T2, yet no explanation has been given by the SRA as to the exceptional circumstances preventing these complaints being resolved quicker.

We can also see from the FOIA request that the complaints against ACS:Law appear to be following exactly the same pattern.

In this case the complaints have not yet been concluded, but at the time of writing 51% of complaints have already passed beyond the 6 month target (according to target less than 13% should have done so). We are also less than two months from the first complaints against ACS:Law also exceeding the 12 month target.

To our knowledge no complainant has been kept up to date on the timeliness of their complaints nor given any indication of their progress. This appears to be completely unacceptable, especially given the continued failing to meet targets.

Sadly, the office that set the targets is due to have closed on the 31st March, and therefore is no longer in a position to uphold them, but those who have made complaints should persist as they deserve and have a right to be heard.

Those affected should take their cases to the Office of the Legal Services Ombudsman and the Ministry of Justice to ask why these timeliness targets have not been adhered to and why there has been no communication as to the progress of their complaint.

One could perhaps conclude that the reasons for the delays are obvious. Due to the activities of ACS:Law, DigiProtect and their faceless, entirely non-UK clients, the systems of the SRA have been entirely overwhelmed. This means that not only do recipients of these letters get a poor service from the SRA, but quite possibly complainants in other areas of law.

But despite these huge and growing problems, Andrew Crossley from ACS:Law is absolutely defiant that he will continue to operate this scheme in the UK. His claim that his number one priority is protecting copyright is increasingly falling on deaf ears, particularly when he revealed recently that in the last 11 months alone he had collected £1 million from letter recipients.

The cost to the legal profession overall, however, can’t be measured in terms of money. Some things have greater value.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Since TBI has been around for some 170 years, appeared to be a traditional law firm with previously good reputation, but was now publicly representing porn-industry clients in a controversial practice, TorrentFreak earlier asked the company the following question:

“Taking into consideration that when operating almost identical schemes both ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons became the subject of SRA investigations, coupled with the Lords labeling this type of scheme “legal blackmail“, are Tilly Bailey & Irvine concerned about tarnishing their hard-earned reputation?”

TBI declined to answer this and the rest of our questions but were quickly labeled by the UK Lords discussing the Digital Economy Bill as “new entrants to the hall of infamy” and their activities labeled “an embarrassment to the rest of the creative rights industry”.

The pressure continued to build when settlement letter recipients wrote complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) so it didn’t really come as a surprise when we discovered TBI had been trying to re-write history by modifying their Wikipedia page recently.

At the time we wondered if this meant the company had abandoned its action against file-sharers. That question has now been answered by UK consumer group Which?

In a letter sent to the SRA on April 1, TBI wrote: “We have been surprised and disappointed at the amount of adverse publicity that our firm has attracted in relation to this work and the extra time and resources that have been required to deal solely with this issue.

We are concerned that the adverse publicity could affect other areas of our practice and therefore following discussions with our clients, we have reluctantly agreed that we will cease sending out further letters of claim.”

Deborah Prince, head of in-house legal at Which? said that she is really pleased that TBI has seen sense and left this arena.

“Hopefully, other law firms thinking of going down a similar route will begin to realise that although this work can generate vast financial rewards for law firms and their clients, it can also bring a lot of adverse publicity simply because the practice is inherently unfair and unethical.”

Consumer group BeingThreatened.com, who have worked relentlessly to assist those sent letters by TBI, ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons, also welcome the news, but want TBI to go further.

“We are cautiously optimistic that it marks the end for the innocent people who have been in touch with us to complain of the accusations. However, we believe that an apology is owed to those individuals, and would encourage TBI to come forward and say sorry,” they told TorrentFreak

“They’ve already taken the difficult step of admitting to their error, this extra step would serve to restore some confidence that the legal system is not merely there to be abused for making money through volume litigation against the innocent and unaware.”

With this announcement by TBI, only ACS:Law remain in this type of business in the UK, so are they concerned about damage to their reputation? Absolutely not. We’ll go into more details in our report next week.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Often when people are wrongfully accused there is speculation that the individual’s wireless router could have been compromised and used to carry out an infringement. However, many other instances of wrongful accusations go unexplained.

Understandably fingers then get pointed at the quality of evidence being gathered. How foolproof are these systems? How much time and effort has gone into their creation? Do they live up to their ‘forensic-quality’ claims?

In the vast majority of cases these questions go completely unanswered, since the innards of such software and systems are never opened up for public scrutiny. This is naturally a concern for those trying to protest their innocence.

Many times here on TorrentFreak we’ve covered the activities of ACS:Law, the lawyers making a huge noise in the UK right now as they chase BitTorrent users for hundreds of pounds each. One person involved heavily in this work at ACS:Law is Terence Tsang, who previously worked on similar file-sharing cases with lawyers Davenport Lyons.

Tsang is also involved in other online businesses, including Japanese car sales and other computing-based projects and regularly requests work from freelancers, as can be seen from these examples on his Freelancer.com page.

One of these – Nonpublic project #245939 (account required, screenshot) – is of particular interest.

“Create a bit-torrent client for me which will obtain details about file sharers of certain torrents. Server is Linux. The torrent client just needs to monitor IP addresses and take information which is then placed in a database,” writes Tsang in his request.

“The information needed is as follows: Host IP, Hit Date and time (GMT time), Provider network name (i believe whois search will help with this – can you think of a better way?), P2P Client, File name, File size, MD5 of file,” he adds.

“So we need to get the software to monitor a number of specific torrents it needs to create a database of the above information. The database needs to be able to import into a database file like csv. I am only interested in UK IP addresses. Easy job if you have the skills,” he concludes.

We cannot confirm if Tsang bought this code on behalf of DL, ACS:Law or indeed himself for some kind of lone operation. Since no information is ever offered about the tracking systems used to gather evidence, we cannot say which cases, if any, this code was used for either. What we do know is that there were 4 bids for the work and the job was eventually awarded.

The average settlement from a single letter recipient is $900, so how much was paid for this valuable piece of code which must clearly perform perfectly?

Between $250 and $750.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

While here at TorrentFreak we have published many news articles on the antics of anti-piracy lawyers Davenport Lyons and latterly ACS:Law, what many people won’t realize is that it’s over on Slyck where the real meat of the ‘backroom’ discussions about this business have been taking place.

In Slyck’s ‘UK Filesharing Allegations/Lawsuit Discussion’ section are multiple thousands of posts from those affected by these ‘pay up or else’ schemes. It is from these forums that people have worked together to support each other and work out ways of fighting back against intimidation. Many forum posters, with the help received on Slyck and these threads, have refused to pay up and have still not done so. The value of these threads to letter recipients cannot be understated.

Herein lies the problem. This forum has dramatically undermined the business model of both Davenport Lyons and ACS:Law because, quite simply, it enables people to stand strong and cut off the revenue source to these lawyers’ clients.

And now ACS:Law have moved to do something about it through the legal system, claiming that some forum posts by Slyck members are harming their business, citing grounds of defamation.

According to site editor Thomas Mennecke, Slyck were told to remove three discussion threads containing more than 10,300 posts in their entirety by 4:00pm March 12, 2010.

Mennecke says that ACS:Law cites just 11 posts as evidence of defamation. One calls an employee of ACS:Law, Terence Tsang, a “wanker” and another describes the ‘pay up or else’ scheme as “a wank plan” while saying that ACS:Law are “not the best at getting things right.”

It is very interesting that ACS:Law have chosen these comments.

When ACS:Law first burst onto this scene, TorrentFreak contacted owner Andrew Crossley and asked him if there is a connection between his company and Davenport Lyons, since we suspected he’d taken up the work previously done by the London-based firm.

He told us that connections were “NONE” – but sadly this wasn’t true.

We’ve long suspected it, but it was recently confirmed in an interview conducted by the BBC with Andrew Crossley that, “Many of the cases already under way were passed on to ACS: Law by another law firm, Davenport Lyons, which originally began the claims.”

In respect of the forum post about Terence Tsang, although we don’t know what he does in the privacy of his own home, what we do know is that while he is currently working for ACS:Law, he previously worked for Davenport Lyons.

Furthermore, staff from ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons have all been seen together in court together, working on these cases. So as the connections between the companies mount up, it seems that ACS:Law really aren’t the best at “getting things right” after all.

Needless to say, Slyck aren’t going to be bullied by ACS:Law and have refused to take down the posts.

You can read the whole sorry episode in Thomas Mennecke’s article “Wank Plan Goes Wrong: ACS:Law Threatens Slyck.com With a Lawsuit” over on Slyck.

TorrentFreak has also been informed that a torrent of all the discussions is being prepared and will soon be seeded on every major BitTorrent tracker. If ACS:Law haven’t yet heard of the Streisand Effect, maybe they should look it up.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

We’re used to receiving these type of emails – we’ve been having them in one shape or another since Davenport Lyons (DL) started sending them out in 2007, and more recently from recipients of letters from ACS:Law.

Founded in 1841, Tilly Bailey & Irvine (TBI) are a law firm based in the North East of England and from what we’ve seen thus far in respect of this business, their modus operandi appears to have much in common with those of DL and ACS.

On January 27th/28th 2010 in the name of Media & More GmbH & Co, TBI successfully obtained a court order against ISP BT who, as usual (and unlike ISP TalkTalk which refuses to comply with these orders), simply rolled over and complied, handing over the personal details of their customers to TBI in super-quick time and charging £12,500 for the service.

In common with ACS, Tilly Bailey & Irvine are in bed with pornographers.

One outfit confirmed as a client of TBI is Golden Eye (International) Ltd, a company connected with the Ben Dover porn brand in the UK and one that has already been pursuing alleged file-sharers in Germany for the movie “Fancy An Indian – Five Spicy Dishes Covered In A Hot Creamy Sauce.” Media & More GmbH & Co have disputes in Germany with the movie “The Babysitter # 8 Cute Cock Craving Girls!”

Unusually for these type of cases, TBI send their letters by recorded delivery, an expense avoided by DL and ACS. TBI want more money than their counterparts too – £800 – but like Davenport Lyons threaten to enforce the debt against a non-payers property. They also suggest they have criminal remedies open to them which is typical of the usual heavy-handed and disproportionate psychological warfare tactics we’ve come to expect in these cases.

Those who choose to pay up are asked to sign ‘undertakings’ that they will refrain from certain things in future, one of which is to keep the terms of any settlement “secret”.

The claim letters also contain selected pages from a 160 ‘expert report’ created by
Projective Expert Group on behalf of Media Protector GmbH, the company whose ‘FileWatch‘ system was used to capture evidence used in the claim. In all cases we’ve seen thus far the allegations are connected to the eD2K network. The system appears to differ somewhat from those used previously to log alleged BitTorrent infringers and will be dissected in a future article.

TorrentFreak contacted Amanda Mitten, a lawyer in the ‘Intellectual Property Team’ at Tilly Bailey & Irvine dealing with these cases. In addition to asking how many letters the company intends to send out and a request for a list of movie titles to be claimed on, we asked some other key questions, including;

- Will TBI really “commence proceedings” within 14 days if people don’t pay up? [ACS has claimed the same but thus far has taken no-one to court]
- Can we have a full copy of the ‘expert’s report’ on the FileWatch system?
- How will the evidence identify an infringer behind an IP address and not just a bill payer? How does TBI justify claiming against a bill payer when they’re not certain he or she is an infringer?
- How do those accused go about proving a negative, i.e they didn’t carry out the infringement TBI claim they did? [this point was raised by the Lords recently]
- The letters being sent out by TBI are similar to those sent out by ACS and very, very similar to those sent out by Davenport Lyons. We earlier asked ACS if they were connected to DL – they said “NO”, but that wasn’t exactly true. We asked TBI if they are in anyway connected to either ACS or DL.
- Taking into consideration that when operating almost identical schemes both ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons became the subject of SRA investigations, coupled with the Lords labeling this type of scheme “legal blackmail“, are Tilly Bailey & Irvine concerned about tarnishing their hard-earned reputation?

After emails back and forth, mostly spent talking about TorrentFreak and the nature of this website, Tilly Bailey & Irvine refused to answer any of our questions.

Nevertheless, as expected their activities haven’t gone unnoticed and are already the subject of discussion by the Lords in the Digital Economy Bill debate, with Tilly Bailey & Irvine being mentioned by name yesterday. Lord Clement Jones labeled them, ACS:Law and the Logistep data-gathering outfit “an embarrassment to the rest of the creative rights industry.”

Baroness Howe of Idlicote said that the problem “has to be dealt with and is disgraceful,” adding, “If these firms really are law firms, they are bringing their whole profession into disrepute.”

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.

We will follow this post up in due course with a closer look at the companies, people and tracking system involved in this business model, so if you have any information and would like to contribute (German contributors and eD2k specialists especially welcome), please contact us in the usual manner.

Worried letter recipients can visit BeingThreatened for more advice.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.