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.

A ruling by a court in Frankfurt on January 29th could now have put DigiProtect’s “Turn Piracy Into Profit” mass-warning business model into jeopardy.

An individual was sent a letter by the lawyer Udo Kornmeier on behalf of DigiProtect. The letter contained accusations of illicit file-sharing including a customary cash payment demand of around 651 euros to cover legal costs based on an infringement claim of 10,000 euros. It was accompanied by a demand to pay a further 150 euros in order to acquire a license from the copyright holder for the material downloaded.

While the file-sharer didn’t contest the 150 euro license fee, he refused to pay the 651 euros legal bill. DigiProtect’s lawyers countered with an offer for him to pay 450 euros plus the 150 euros license fee. Again the file-sharer rejected the offer.

DigiProtect then went on to sue the man for 651.80 euros and the case went to court.

In court the judge asked DigiProtect and its lawyers to open up their books to show what legal costs were actually incurred (and paid) to perform legal actions against the file-sharer and send him the letters. Both DigiProtect and their lawyer refused to submit the information.

During the hearing the judge discovered that the relationship between DigiProtect and its lawyers was covered by an agreement similar to the one it had previously with lawyers Davenport Lyons for their UK operations. The details of that arrangement were leaked out last year by a disgruntled insider and revealed some embarrassing truths about the operation.

DigiProtect and its German lawyer refused to allow the agreement between them to be shown in court which meant that the true costs of pursuing the file-sharer remained unproven.

The judge said that even if DigiProtect had paid 651.80 euros to its lawyers to pursue the file-sharer, these cannot be considered as involuntary damages since DigiProtect paid this fee to its lawyer voluntarily. Therefore the only involuntary damages in this case was the 150 euros rights holder licensing fee.

Due to this lack of transparency, the judge decided that the file-sharer did not have to pay DigiProtect the claimed 651.80 euros legal action costs, only the 150 euros licensing fee.

Clearly, if the lawyers can’t get their sizable share of the spoils in this “Turn Piracy Into Profit” operation, the whole business plan falls down. There was certainly no profit to be made from this file-sharer – time will tell if this effect ripples on to other cases.

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

“The industry has been extremely slow to listen to the demands of its customers, and has had something of an abusive relationship with them, seeking to punish them before thinking of how to serve them better,” he noted.

Lucas went on to say that it took the industry a decade to produce sensible alternatives to illicit file-sharing and cast doubt on their ability to identify infringers from an IP address alone.

However, hidden away in the text of the 2nd reading of the Digital Economy Bill were some encouraging signs that the government will have to take notice of the companies generating profit from alleged file-sharing (by sending threatening ‘pay up or else’ letters), under the guise of protecting the ‘creativity’ of the porn industry.

“We have to be careful too about the industry cloaking itself in the finery of the small, creative individual,” said Lucas. “We are not talking about the small, creative individual here, but about powerful, monopolistic industries and giving them power over citizens. We must be careful of that.”

Although he didn’t mention them by name, there can be little doubt Lord Lucas was referring to UK lawyers ACS:Law (and previously Davenport Lyons) and their German partners, Digiprotect.

“Pornography is widely used on the internet and is one of the most assiduous industries when it comes to pursuing people for supposed non-payment for illegal downloads et cetera. We have to face it that we will be putting a lot of people into the hands of pornographers and their lawyers if we are not careful about the way we draft the Bill,” he said.

As we pointed out in a previous article, the proposals being put forward in the Digital Economy Bill do not trump the old copyright system, meaning that if rights holders (Digiprotect) and lawyers (ACS:Law) wish to continue with their campaigns of sending letters and demanding huge sums of money instead, they will be perfectly entitled to do so.

But not if Lord Lucas has his way.

“Secondly, it should be compulsory for copyright holders to go through the mechanism we are putting in place. It is not acceptable that we are putting in place a mechanism for them to deal with peer-to-peer file-sharing and for them still to go immediately to lawyers and harass people as the pornography industry does already. The briefing that noble Lords will have seen from Which? describes the consequences well. We should take the opportunity of this Bill to stamp that out,” he said.

Noting that claims from porn rights holders have often been made against innocent people, Lord Clement-Jones also said that provisions should be made to bring the scheme to an end.

“Of late, we have seen a proliferation of lawyers’ letters, acting for the pornography industry, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, pointed out, often against innocent people asserting copyright claims and threatening court action,” he said.

“Which? and others are right to raise these cases, but I hope that the provisions of the new code will obviate the need for this heavy-handed type of action.”

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

As first reported here on TorrentFreak, Digiprotect is the company working with lawyers ACS:Law in the UK to prepare tens of thousands of letters to go out to Internet users they say have been sharing pornographic movies.

Each of these letters sent in the UK will carry a cash demand – a very profitable one at that – which mirrors the ones it sends to menace Internet users in Germany.

Now, according to Christian Solmecke, a lawyer with Wilde & Beuger law firm who works to defend alleged file-sharers in the country, Digiprotect appears to be stooping to new lows.

Solmecke says that his company has come into possession of a letter being sent out by debt collection agency Media Inkasso to a file-sharer who thus far appears to have refused to cave in to previous demands to “pay up or else”.

In it is a claim on behalf of Digiprotect for 650 euros plus around 11 euros in interest, plus what it refers to as “collection costs” of 127 euros.

The body of the letter informs the letter recipient that “..since you have not responded to earlier demands for payment by the rightsholder [Digiprotect]” the debt agency is now instructed to collect damages in respect of a previous allegation of copyright infringement – most likely the alleged sharing of a pornographic movie.

“If by the listed date no money has been deposited in our account, our client will commence court proceedings against you at considerable cost to you,” it adds.

So it appears that based on just an allegation of copyright infringement along with a demand to pay 650 euros, the letter recipient has not responded, so therefore it is now being considered by Digiprotect as a debt to be enforced by debt collectors.

Let’s hope that the recipient refuses to be cowed and stands up to this scheme, which is difficult to describe in any terms other than extortion.

This news is the latest in a long line of controversies hitting Digitprotect’s business. A couple of weeks ago we reported on the leaked documents that were handed to news outlet Gulli.

After analysis, a German lawyer now believes that the way the project was handled between Digiprotect and its lawyers could actually be illegal, meaning that thousands of individuals may have received fraudulent demands for payment.

The debt collection letter can be viewed here.

The government in the UK is now sitting up and listening on this issue and at long last there appears to be moves to deal with the similar scheme in operation there. In the meantime, readers in the UK are reminded that if they receive demands from ACS:Law on behalf of Digiprotect, they should visit BeingThreatened.com for advice.

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