But bad publicity and intense controversy greeted the law firm and its owner Andrew Crossley at every turn and eventually the company went bust. Today, Crossley faced the ultimate shame as a lawyer, by appearing before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).

Despite previous displays of stubborn bravado, according to ‘Speculative Invoicing’ expert Will Gilmour who was in court today, Crossley disputed only one of the seven charges against him.

Firstly, the charge that he allowed his independence to be compromised and acted in a manner contrary to the best interests of his clients – ironically the copyright holders on whose behalf he extracted cash settlements from the public – was not contested.

Crossley, whose disastrous foray into this controversial work was laid bare when his company documents were leaked onto the web in 2010, lodged no dispute against claims that he acted in a way that was likely to diminish the trust the public places in him or in the legal profession.

The fourth accusation, that Crossley “Entered into arrangements to receive contingency fees for work done in prosecuting or defending contentious proceedings before the Courts of England and Wales except as permitted by statute or the common law” was also met with acceptance from the lawyer.

Furthermore, Crossley did not contest that he acted where there was a “conflict of interest in circumstances not permitted, in particular because there was a conflict with those of his clients,” nor that he “used his position as a Solicitor to take or attempt to take unfair advantage of other persons being recipients of letters of claim either for his own benefit or for the benefit of his clients.”

The only point contested by Crossley related to an SRA/SDT accusation that he acted improperly in connection with data breaches from ACS:Law’s website during 2010. Crossley pointed the finger at the company’s web host for allegedly leaving a backup of the lawfirm’s data in a publicly accessible area.

In their decision announced just a few moments ago, the Tribunal suspended Crossley from operating as a lawyer for 2 years and ordered him to pay costs of £77,000. While opponents had hoped for a permanent ban, the lengthy suspension will be seen as a huge black mark against his reputation.

Also revealed in the hearing was the personal cost to the now-suspended lawyer. In addition to being unable to find work since the revelations against him, Crossley remains bankrupt and has split from his partner of 15 years.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Solicitors Regulatory Authority have just published a list of the charges Crossley will face. They claim that the lawyer:

1) Allowed his independence to be compromised
2) Acted contrary to the best interests of his clients
3) Acted in a way that was likely to diminish the trust the public places in him or in the legal profession
4) Entered into arrangements to receive contingency fees for work done in prosecuting or defending contentious proceedings before the Courts of England and Wales except as permitted by statute or the common law
5) Acted where there was a conflict of interest in circumstances not permitted, in particular because there was a conflict with those of his clients
6) Used his position as a Solicitor to take or attempt to take unfair advantage of other persons being recipients of letters of claim either for his own benefit or for the benefit of his clients.

and finally..

7) Acted without integrity in that he provided false information in statements made to the Court.

Earlier in the year Crossley, a recently declared bankrupt, complained that he has no money to mount a proper defense at the forthcoming SDT hearing. In order to cut costs 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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Since we were interested in his work, TorrentFreak gave ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley an opportunity to tell everyone about his business. Our very first question was this: “What is your connection with Davenport Lyons?”

The answer from Crossley was plain and straightforward.

“None,” he told us via email on 8th May 2009.

Having followed these cases for some time, we immediately suspected that we were being misled. At the time, however, we had no hard evidence to prove it.

But now, as confirmed by these previously unpublished excerpts from the Solicitors Regulation Authority report into Crossley’s activities, it is clear that four days after he spoke with us he was telling the SRA investigation a completely different story.

During a telephone conversation between Mr Roberts [of the SRA] and Mr Crossley on 12 May 2009, Mr Crossley confirmed that all of the non-contentious work in relation to each of Davenport Lyons’ remaining four clients had been transferred to ACS:Law.

Furthermore, Crossley also employed two staff directly from Davenport Lyons to carry on the file-sharing settlement work. The best known recruit was Terence Tsang and as confirmed by another extract from the SRA investigation report, the second was Adam Glenn.

During the Davenport Lyons investigation, the Investigation Officers interviewed the supervisor of the P2P file sharing department, Adam Glenn. Mr Glenn joined ACS:Law as a senior supervisor in May 2009 and it is understood carries out broadly the same duties at ACS:Law as he had undertaken whilst employed by Davenport Lyons.

As if Crossley’s reputation hadn’t already taken a big enough battering from the recently leaked emails, an article published this week in The Telegraph illustrated yet again that at times this man has difficulty playing a straight ball.

The article, ‘ACS Law: Are you a middle-class pirate? This lawyer would like a word with you…’ details an extended personal interview conducted with Crossley just a week before his company emails were spilled out onto the Internet.

“When we spoke he [Crossley] had portrayed himself as a pauper, telling me that ‘less than a month ago’ he had been wandering around an air show with no money in his pocket and not a ‘penny to my name’,” wrote Telegraph reporter Paul Kendall a short way into the article.

Sadly for Crossley, the leaked emails painted a different picture.

“….[Crossley] had just bought a Bentley Arnage, was considering buying a Ferrari F430 Spider ‘in a couple of months’ and was hoping to move into a new home with ‘five double bedrooms, three bathrooms and four reception rooms’,” noted Kendall, quoting from the leaked emails.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Crossley admitted he could go bankrupt without the file-sharing work, so there’s little doubt where this money was coming from.

Of course, at the time when Crossley made his ‘pauper’ comments he would’ve had no idea that the leaked emails would later show that he had been misleading a reporter from a national newspaper. However, at some point Crossley changed his mind about his position before The Telegraph published their article, and then made an unsuccessful attempt at censoring it.

“Hi Paul,” wrote Crossley in an email to Kendall. “One thing I wanted to scratch from the interview was I said I had no money recently. That was not an accurate reflection of the position.”

“Accurate reflection”? I think we’re starting to get the hang of this “legal jargon”….

The Telegraph article raises some other interesting issues, particularly where one thing is being said by ACS in public but differing conclusions and other motivations are being discussed in private. They weren’t detailed in the piece, but we’re happy to help.

When Kendall visited ACS:Law’s offices he saw two rows of crates carrying documents labeled ‘First Bare Denial’, ‘Second Bare Denial’, ‘Admissions and Settlements’, ‘Drop Claims’, and ‘Complex and Sensitive’.

“I make a mental note to ask Crossley about the latter, but before I get the chance, I’m distracted by one of the paralegals on the phone,” wrote Kendall. “For most of the time I’ve been in the room he’s been taking a steady flow of payments, but this time I hear him tell the caller that their case has been dropped.”

Kendall asked Crossley why they took this action.

“The woman I was talking to had just come off chemotherapy,” said Crossley. “She’s on disability allowance and says she can’t afford to pay.”

What’s this? Compassion from ACS:Law? Hardly. Maybe this internal email describes their motivations a little more clearly.

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:30:56 -0000

Fellow Paralegals,

From now on, if you find a response to a third party letter, do not send a security letter. Instead, please move the letter into the ABANDON HOPE folder in General Paras.

This is because Andrew and Adam will be drafting a new letter so we can drop a couple of hundred cases over the next couple of weeks, putting pressure on those who we do not drop to settle.

If you find someone who is blind, one legged and dying, and you think they are not worth pursuing due to the possibility of bad PR, please also put them in there. However, the majority of cases will be continued.

Those following ACS:Law closely will remember Crossley making rather a big thing about dropping cases, even announcing that he was doing so on his now defunct website. We now have an insight into why, but Crossley doesn’t miss an opportunity for some good PR.

“We drop many cases,” Crossley told Kendall. “I’ve dropped cases where people have sent money in. To give you just one example, a chap wrote in. He said: ‘I don’t know what this is about, but, unfortunately, your letter arrived a week after my wife died. I’m in no fit state to deal with this so I’m just paying it.’”

“I sent the cheque straight back. I said: ‘We’re not here to pursue people who aren’t in a position to consider it properly.’”

But people who were in a position to “consider it properly” were still hounded by the company. One accused individual wrote back to ACS:Law with the following defenses which were logged in company files as follows:

Defence 1: CATEGORICALLY DENIED

Defence 2: HAS NOT INFRINGED COPYRIGHT OR AUTHORISED ANYONE TO DO SO

Defence 3: NO UK LAW WE CAN USE TO PROSECUTE HIM

In reference to item 3, the letter recipient resides in Scotland (London Patent County Court used by ACS only has jurisdiction to hear cases from England and Wales). Coupled with items 1 and 2, that should have been the end of the case. Instead, the following email was written in response:

Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 16:25:38 +0100

Dear Leyla,

I have drafted a final warning for this infringer as he resides in Scotland. He sent an internet template letter in response to our letter of claim.

Other emails reveal that other Scottish cases are also given special treatment. In one case it was felt that sending a ‘Final Warning Letter’ might not be appropriate, not because the letter recipient’s claims of innocence had been accepted, but because they had engaged the assistance of the Citizens Advice Bureau. The defenses lodged by the accused and listed by ACS:Law were as follows:

Defence 1: Responded with template letter
Defence 2: Categorically denies infringement
Defence 3: No UK law we can prosecute her with

So with the one-legged, dying, disabled and Scottish out of the way, what about children? The Telegraph raised this with Crossley.

“Later, when I suggest that parents can’t be held responsible for everything their children do online, [Crossley] seems to change his position on this, arguing that the children themselves – ‘after the age of 10 or 11’ – should be sued, but I suspect this is just bluster,” wrote Kendall.

Bluster indeed. Yet again, this seems to be a case of Crossley saying one thing in public, but his expert Adam Glenn advising him differently in private.

From: “Adam Glen”
To: “‘Andrew Crossley’”
Cc: “‘Jonathan Miller’”
Subject: RE: SCTR_30001607 – BORRIE – JMM
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 21:53:08 -0000

[...]Section 97 provides for the damages in an infringement action. In determining damages s97(1) provides an effective mens rea component to the infringing act. This means that it is not the equivalent of a strict liability offence.

The Act asks if the defendant knew if copyright subsisted in the work at the time and whether they had reason to believe that it subsisted in the work. If it can be shown that that knowledge and belief did not exist then the rights-holder “is not entitled to damages”.

The question is therefore whether the child, aged 14, had such knowledge or belief. On the basis of settled law, using either criminal and tortious precedents as a guide, I would submit that it is likely that the courts would make a decision on the basis of the capability of the child and any expectation of whether a child of that age would have such knowledge or belief. I would caution that that would be a difficult presumption for us to sustain on current case law.

Thus if we cannot show, on the balance of probabilities, that the daughter had knowledge and belief then, under the act, we are not able to claim damages.[...]

But this is probably moot since ACS:Law would never pursue a case against a child in court, because if the letter recipient refused to pay, the case would almost certainly be filed in the ‘Drop Claims’ or ‘Complex and Sensitive’ crate.

Finally, we’ll just touch on the confidence ACS:Law have in the evidence they use to prise settlement from individuals.

“Our evidence is pretty compelling,” Crossley told Kendall. “Everybody says it’s not, but it really is.”

“Every time an application is submitted to court for disclosure from ISPs, there is an independent expert’s report analysing and reviewing the integrity and accuracy of the data that’s being captured,” he later added.

Independent expert? That does indeed sound quite compelling. ACS:Law must be very happy and completely convinced that their “expert” knows what he’s talking about? As it turns out, they aren’t at all.

In an email dated August 24th 2010, Adam Glenn runs the idea past Crossley of getting an “Alternate Expert Witness”. It contains a line which suggests serious concerns exist with their current ‘expert witness’.

You know my view on the quality of Clem Vogler’s expert witness statement and what I perceive as the opportunity it provides to serious challenge.

The Telegraph interview took place before the hugely damaging email leaks and a number of publications have been trying very hard hard to get a comment out of ACS:Law ever since. They got one line.

“It’s business as usual at ACS:Law,” Crossley told the media at the end of September.

These were the last public words of ACS:Law, either through the press or via their now defunct website. Both ACS:Law domain names are currently parked.

The company sent out a flood of letters warning recipients that they have 14 days to pay up or see their papers filed out court. Some papers have indeed been filed at court, but that means little and is being seen as a last throw of the dice to get people to pay up. There is no indication of mass panic setting in among the accused.

While ACS:Law and Andrew Crossley have made many questionable statements in the course of their settlement letter business, there is one big one that still hasn’t come to fruition. Time and again they promised to bring a case to court – a full, proper, bona fide contested case against one of the dozens of innocents they have wrongfully accused.

It’s sad that they didn’t do that and we maintain today, as we have done all along, that it will never happen. We’ll also go out on a limb with an even bigger prediction. The ACS:Law settlement business is over.

“Business as usual?”

Sure.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite mounting criticism and the immense pressure of several hundred complaints about his company’s conduct delivered to the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority, in public Crossley has remained strong. Defending his position at every available opportunity through media interviews and self-penned pieces, one might be forgiven for thinking that nothing could shake this man from his ‘turn piracy into profit’ crusade.

But behind closed doors, things were very different.

“I am worried about the latest developments. Apparently there are presently over 500 complaints against me thanks to the internet campaign and Which,” Crossley wrote to his advisor just over a month ago.

“Each complaint is essentially the same and they are borne out of a determination by some to stop legitimate steps being taken to curtail illegal file sharing. However, I do not know how I can avoid being found guilty of something, with 500 complaints to choose from,” he continued.

The concern that Crossley shows for the complaints that have been made to the SRA will be very empowering for those who took the time to write to the solicitors’ watchdog. Some individuals had begun to air frustration that their efforts had been in vain, but even in advance of a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal decision which is still some time off, it is clear those efforts have seriously got under Crossley’s skin.

But the problems for ACS:Law go deeper than the SRA investigation. While turning alleged file-sharing infringements into settlement agreements, and in turn transforming those into hard cash may be a fairly new business model, it suffers from the same problems as any commercial operation.

Despite Crossley pulling in huge amounts of money and leading the high-life, company emails reveal that he paid the bulk of his employees very little. Nevertheless, the costs of operating the business had been spiralling in recent months causing it to experience cash-flow and other financial problems.

One long-running payment dispute involved UK ISP Entanet who had been supplying ACS with customer identities and charging for the service. In March this year, a series of emails between Entanet and ACS Law’s company-hopping Terence Tsang revealed that the law firm still had not paid an invoice from July 2009, some 8 months earlier, and several thousand pounds remained outstanding.

After promising to pay but failing to do so, Entanet said they would no longer provide ACS with subscriber details and threatened to take the law firm to court for the debt. The company also had problems paying an O2 bill of more than £13,000. Even ACS:Law business partner Lee Bowden from Media CAT became irate in August after his emails demanding money owed went unanswered.

“You seem to have ignored my previous e-mail, I am not happy and want some revenue in account,” he wrote to Crossley. “Everyone is getting [th]eir bit and I am owed £17k ffs.”

Of course, financial frictions are a daily event for many companies. But for a firm already under pressure, with its owner seriously considering the future viability of the business, there were added pressures. As Crossley made clear to his advisor in August, ACS:Law’s entire future hangs on the success, or failure, of his Speculative Invoicing model.

“If I stop this work my business will fold and my clients will be big losers, but if I carry on I fear that it will be worse for me in the long run,” he wrote to his advisor, prophetically.

If Crossley was of the opinion that things could be worse in the “long run” even before the email leak, one can only imagine what he is thinking now. Even back then, just over a month ago, he was clearly disillusioned and on the verge of giving in.

“Presently I feel defeated by it and feel I should shut up shop, which will cause me to go bankrupt for certain,” he explained. The prospect of ACS:Law stopping their activities will be music to the ears of many thousands of people, but what are the chances of that?

Looking at the business chain, fairly high. Even if the various rights holders stick with the company and Crossley doesn’t decide to pull the plug voluntarily, it may prove difficult to service them.

Apart from the fact that the ACS internal emails show significant amounts of friction between the company and their IP harvesting partners, before this fiasco only TalkTalk and Virgin Media refused to cooperate when ACS:Law went to court to request the handover of customer data. After the epic data leak of BSkyB, BT and Plusnet user data, all of these ISPs have said they will cease cooperation with the company. Furthermore, at this stage it seems unthinkable that any ISP would risk being seen to hand over data to ACS:Law.

Furthermore, it would also seem reasonable to presume that Chief Master Winegarten will probably feel a little uncomfortable authorizing any more court orders until ACS can prove they have their house in order, and that could take a very long time indeed. Coupled with the cash-flow problems touched on above, that day might never come.

So, with no ISP subscriber details handed over, there will be no names to connect to possible infringements. With no names and addresses to put on letters, there can be no cash settlements. With no cash settlements, there can be no more turning piracy into profit. There could hardly be a more bleak outlook.

But of course, ACS still has all the IP addresses and identities from earlier court orders, maybe they’re hopeful that these could still yield some cash to bridge this period of uncertainty? That seems unlikely. Not even Crossley is confident.

While bemoaning public perception that a complaint had already been upheld against him by his recent referral to the SDT, Crossley concluded: “Meanwhile, thanks to Which and their lawyer I doubt that the latest campaigns which we were out to run will have any meaningful recovery..”

It is easy to blame (or credit, depending on your perspective) Which? for cutting off ACS:Law’s revenue stream (arguably BeingThreatened.com have made a greater contribution in this respect) but since the email leak and the absolute destruction of the company’s reputation, it would take a special kind of letter recipient who, despite the mountain of information available via a simple Google search, still chose to keep the company alive by paying them money.

But, as the saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Sadly, ACS:Law don’t appear to be practicing what they preach, despite taking the moral high-ground with the hundreds of recipients of their letters.

In an article published on their site entitled “20th Century Fox hit by illegal downloads” (Google cache copy here, since the page has been removed after we published this). ACS:Law appear to have taken the easy option and instead of writing their own article, chose to cut and paste paragraph after paragraph of other people’s work, passing it off as their own, without so much as a link to any source or a mention of an author’s or publication name.

Paragraph 1 of ACS:Law article

Almost a month before Wolverine hit the movie theaters a workprint copy of the movie was “leaked” onto the Web. It was a copy that was half finished as far as the special effects were concerned with green screens and wire framed character models visible for all the world to see. The great fight scene at the top of the nuclear reactor was more stickman like drawing that anything to do with the actors. In the end it was an incomplete movie that really only left the majority of those that watched it wanting to see the real thing

Original source article: Written by Steven Hodson over at inquisitr.com

Paragraph 2 of ACS:Law article

AFACT’s director of operations Neil Gane thanked the member of the public who had called attention to the racket and claimed Australian businesses suffered greatly from piracy.

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 3 of ACS:Law article

“That pirated copies of X-Men Origins: Wolverine were discovered amongst the haul is especially disappointing. The film was made in Australia, employed over 1000 Australians, engaged over 100 Australian companies and contributed over $80 million to the local economy. The flagrant sales of pirated copies of the film is a slap in the face to the hard work and creativity that so many Australians put into the movie,” he alleged in a statement. The film has not yet been shown in cinemas worldwide

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 4 of ACS:Law article

The woman’s arrest and the discovery of the discs led police to what was allegedly a disc burner lab in Sydney’s Westmead. The lab allegedly had the potential to produce 378,000 pirated discs a year, worth $1.8 million on the street.

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 5 of ACS:Law article

Marketed as one of this summer’s blockbusters, downloads topped 75,000 within hours of the film being uploaded to BitTorrent and 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Wolverine, said the uploaded version was “stolen, incomplete and early”

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead for The Scotsman

Paragraph 6 of ACS:Law article

The computer-generated imagery had not been added, there were missing scenes, sound and music and Wolverine himself had not yet acquired his enhanced strength with the wires attached to the actor Hugh Jackman still visible on screen.

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead The Scotsman

Paragraph 7 of ACS:Law article

Reviews based on an unfinished film and which have already cost influential Fox News columnist Roger Friedman his job. He was fired for commenting on illegal footage. Richard Mollet is from record label trade body the BPI. He says the industry lost around £200m last year because of illegal downloading.The illegal copy became available on the internet on March 30. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “at last year’s average ticket price of $7.18, the piracy could conceivably – though not likely – have cost Fox $28.7 million.”

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead The Scotsman

Even though there are clearly no references to any sources, links back to the original articles or mention of the author’s name in the ACS:Law article, TorrentFreak contacted all three publications to double check that permission had not been granted. Of the trio, Duncan Riley editor of Inquisitr.com was most vocal, telling TorrentFreak;

“No, we have not given permission for the content to be used. What perhaps is the height of hypocrisy, besides the wholesale theft of the text word for word, is that the paragraph they have taken is from a post that argues that piracy helped Wolverine, and then they’ve added anti-piracy statements to the end.”

We must admit we are very confused. On the one hand ACS:Law speak constantly about how their clients suffer at the hands of copyright infringement, yet the company itself appears to have a different approach when it comes to its own dealings.

Just recently, a support site set up to help recipients of ACS:Law letters cope with their predicament was ordered to stop its activities by ACS:Law (under threat of legal action) after they objected to the link between the site’s domain name (beingscammed.com) and their firm. The owner of the site was forced to publish an apology on the site’s homepage. As expected, another site has taken its place.

ACS:Law have forced others to publish an apology on their site too after comments were made that the law firm objected to. In the interests of fairness, it seems fitting that that Mr Andrew Crossley, as main partner of ACS:Law, publishes his own apology on his site’s homepage for making use of other people’s copyright works and exploiting them for commercial gain.

Andrew Crossley was already fined by the UK’s Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) for engaging in “conduct unbefitting a solicitor” (pdf) back in 2006. We believe that a law firm claiming to uphold copyright law on behalf of its clients but infringing copyright in the process warrants the same label, but we’ll let the Conduct Investigation Unit at the SRA decide.

And to those that think these infringements by ACS:Law are small ones to be brushed off or discounted, then in an ideal world, yes, you would be absolutely correct. No one should care about small infringements of copyright. No-one should have to write articles about petty copyright infringement, but these are the depths to which this arena has sunk.

But consider which games these threats and lawsuits are all about. Two Worlds from Reality Pump is available on Amazon for £12, Topware’s Dream Pinball 3D is available for under £10, Call of Juarez by Techland much less than that. At absolute best ACS:Law has evidence that copyright was infringed via an IP address for a mere second on a few kilobytes of these titles. For these equally small infringements, ACS:Law demand around £600 from the public to satisfy them and their clients, backed up by the threat of ruination in court.

That’s how low we’ve sunk. It must stop, all of it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.