The letters sent out by David Gore and former partner Brian Miller claimed that evidence showed that the letter recipient was guilty of copyright infringement and demanded around £500 in compensation to make highly expensive legal action go away.

However, the highly controversial scheme was drawn to the attention of the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) by consumer magazine Which? when it became clear that the letters, which made some baseless and outlandish claims, were targeting innocent people and were “bullying” in nature.

The subsequent SRA investigation found that Gore and Miller – who has since left Davenport Lyons – knowingly targeted innocent people, failed to act in the best interests of clients, acted in a way likely to diminish trust in the legal profession and had also entered into banned contingency fee arrangements.

In March 2010 the pair were referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) and last week their hearing began. After a shaky start (as detailed in the excellent report from ‘Speculative Invoicing’ expert Will Gilmour) and a certain amount of pessimism that the tribunal would reach a conclusion which would satisfy victims of Gore and Miller’s scheme, after 7 days it was all over.

As reported by ComputerActive, in summing up Timothy Dutton QC for the SRA said that the scheme was designed to make money and “browbeat people into submission”, whether they were innocent or not.

Mr Dutton added that Miller and Gore’s conduct represented “a wholly inappropriate discharge of professional duties” and described the campaign as “a debt collection scheme but no debt was owed.” IP address evidence, Dutton noted, was the “flimsiest” of all evidence.

The hearing ended with the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal finding both Gore and Miller guilty of professional misconduct on all six counts presented. The fate of the pair, which could range from monetary penalties to being disbarred, will be announced next month.

As reported earlier this week, Andrew Crossley from the now defunct ACS:Law will also face the tribunal later this year.

In advance of that hearing, last week Crossley asked the Solicitors Regulatory Authority to cover his costs in the upcoming tribunal, even though they are the body that sent him there.

He is said to be concerned that without being able to compete with the £85K the SRA has set aside for his prosecution, he’d suffer an “inequality of arms”. On the same cost-cutting grounds (Crossley is now a declared bankrupt) he requested that all expert evidence be excluded from the Tribunal.

Crossley’s demands were denied across the board. His tribunal will be heard in October, see you there.

Source: Anti-Piracy Lawyers Found Guilty of Professional Misconduct

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.

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.