Spotlight on ACS:Law ‘blackmail’
p2pnet view P2P | Politics:- They “can accuse absolutely anyone they feel like, and the person will have no choice but to pay the fine they demand – it is legally sanctioned blackmail”.
‘They’ are the members of the Big 4 organised music gang, personified by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music.
Making the charge is lord Ralph Lucas.
Speaking in the House of Lords, he “took aim at ACS:Law solicitors, a firm that has been used by record companies in Britain to intimidate file-sharers, and that has apparently cause an enormous number of complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority,” says Digital Wrong, which recently went online to ‘Stop the Digital Economy Bill’.
Blackmail by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s US Mafia-style enforcer RIAA are “creating a cottage industry for unscrupulous lawyers and the people who hire them,” said p2pnet recently, going on:
The RIAA is a “past master at firing off subpoenas and following them up with threatening ‘pay up or else’ letters”, we said, adding:
“Britain’s ACS:Law is pretty good at it too.”
Digital Wrong singles out the statement below, made by Lucas to the House of Lords.
“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’ “, he says, continuing >>>
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.
“This is a recognition of one of the fundamental problems with a bill like the DEB,” says Digital Wrong. The “consumer-grade networking equipment that is currently available and that has been being given out by ISPs in the past few years does not allow users to defend themselves,” it states, noting >>>
Say, for example, that you get a letter accusing you of violating copyright and demanding that you stop. You know that you haven’t been, and you think that it was probably the tech-savvy kid from next-door breaking into your wireless. What can you do? On most consumer-grade equipment: nothing. The wireless routers that have been distributed by ISPs do not support strong enough encryption to keep him out, nor do they keep detailed enough logs to vindicate yourself.
To put it simply: once the accusation has been made you cannot escape it, since the tools are not available to you to prove your innocence.
In a civil procedure on a technical matter, says the post, “it amounts to blackmail; the cost of defending one of these things is reckoned to be £10,000. You can get away with asking for £500 or £1,000 and be paid on most occasions without any effort having to be made to really establish guilt.
“It is straightforward legal blackmail.”
Click here for details of the bill.
Meanwhile, the Digital Economy Bill is slated to enter committee stage in the House of Lords tomorrow when it’ll be examined line-by-line.
Stay tuned.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Digital Wrong – Record Companies have been harassing innocent users, February 3, 2010
p2pnet – ACS:Law: ‘It’s Christmas. Time to sue’, November 27, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/feed
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
February 5th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
boycot mafiaa . org