Like many others, ‘copyright troll’ Digiprotect include many defendants in their lawsuits that don’t live in the jurisdiction the cases are filed.

The courts are not all happy with this, and many cases have been dismissed for this very reason.

The Judge for Digiprotect USA Corporation v. Does 1-266 went even further and actually slapped Digiprotect on the wrist with a tiny fine.

He awarded the ISPs Comcast and Time Warner Cable $45 per IP address lookup for these wrongfully sued defendants, and asked Digiprotect to stop suing people that live elsewhere..

To use Texas attorney Robert Cashman’s words:

“The court has in effect said, “DO NOT SUE PEOPLE WHO DO NOT LIVE IN NEW YORK IN OUR NEW YORK COURTS!”

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

This idea has been copied from German and UK lawyers who’ve made millions with this pay-up-or-else scheme at relatively low cost. In the UK, however, the tide is slowly turning as judges are increasingly taking the side of the accused. In the US we now see a similar pattern emerging.

Last month, the US Copyright Group (USCG) dropped thousands of alleged BitTorrent file-sharers from the Far Cry case because of a lack of jurisdiction. Although these cases can be refiled in other jurisdictions, it seriously limits the profitability of the law firm’s business model.

And today there is another victory for hundreds of BitTorrent users who were sued by the company DigiProtect, the poster child of the “pay up or else” scheme. DigiProtect is not a copyright holder in the true sense of the word, but simply licenses films and music for peer-to-peer distribution. A license to sue, basically.

Attorney Robert Cashman of Cashman Law Firm just informed us that DigiProtect’s case against 266 alleged file-sharers has pretty much ended. Cashman, who represents one of the defendants accused of sharing ‘Anal Fanatic’, told us that the case was ‘orally’ dismissed by Judge Thomas Griesa.

“I do not know on what grounds it was dismissed, but from what I heard, the judge was upset about the jurisdiction issues and the improper joinder issues with the case,” Cashman told TorrentFreak.

The reason for the dismissal is not yet formally known since the paperwork has yet to be filed. Once this happens more information should be available on the grounds of the dismissal, which will then be official. It is beyond doubt, however, that this development represents yet another setback for the mass-settlement lawsuits that have been filed across the US.

The second mass lawsuit that was filed by DigiProtect is also in trouble. In this case 240 alleged BitTorrent users were sued. However, there are signs that this one, which is appointed to another judge, will not be dismissed just yet.

“I’ve heard that the other case is also in jeopardy because of the improper joinder and improper jurisdiction issues, but my contact did not seem to think it was going to be dismissed outright like the original one,” Cashman said. He advises anyone who’s involved in the case to not sign any settlement agreements yet.

Behind the scenes there are a lot of dirty tricks being played out. Comcast even got involved as the company felt it was being pressured by DigiProtect to hand over subscriber info with deadlines they could not possibly meet. In addition, Cashman told us that DigiProtect continued to pursue settlements after the case was already orally dismissed.

“As a side ethical issue, knowing the case was orally dismissed, DigiProtect’s attorney continued to solicit settlement agreements. It appears based on one of the settlement offers copied to me that he contacted my client directly in violation of the ethics rules.”

“I have already let the court know about Britton Payne’s settlement offers post-dismissal, and have forwarded a redacted copy of the settlement documents to Judge Griesa’s chambers for his review,” Cashman added.

All in all it looks like the once so profitable business model is getting quite a bit of resistance in the US as well as the UK. Although we don’t think it’s going to end soon, the ongoing troubles will at least make sensible copyright holders think twice before they enter this PR nightmare.

DigiProtect on the other hand has little to lose. The company’s sole purpose seems to be to exploit the copyrights of others by suing users of file-sharing networks. They are copyright parasites in the truest sense of the word, and a prime example of how copyright – which was invented to protect makers of creative works – is being abused.

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

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.

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

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.

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

“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.”

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

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.

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

Although there is an insistence that the project is aimed at reducing piracy, in reality piracy is the scheme’s lifeblood, providing healthy profits for all concerned, except the original rightsholders that is.

On November 19th at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, ACS:Law made NPO (Norwich Pharmacal Order) applications in order to force ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of subscribers the company claims infringed their client’s rights.

The NPO’s related to approximately 25,000 IP addresses harvested from UK ISP BT’s subscriber base and a further 5,000 from various other ISPs, covering approximately 291 movie titles.

Present at the hearing before Chief Master Winegarten (CMW) were Andrew Crossley and Terence Tsang from ACS:Law, representatives from UK ISP BT and three representatives from consumer outfit Which?, who previously made official complaints regarding the conduct of Davenport Lyons. Also present were two individuals previously wrongly accused, who are regulars at the support site BeingThreatened.com.

Before the hearing began, CMW noted that he had received letters of complaint from the public about the scheme. As reported to TorrentFreak by those present, during the hearing Andrew Crossley made some interesting comments.

After CMW expressed interest in what happens to an accused infringer after the court order is granted and a letter sent, Crossley said that his company was not suggesting that the recipient is definitely guilty in all cases, but the Internet account holder who receives the letter could perhaps help them to identify the person who had actually carried out the infringement.

It is worth noting that ISP account holders are not liable for copyright infringement carried out on his/her connection if a) they did not carry it out themselves or b) did not authorize any infringement. If they did neither they can simply write back to ACS:Law explaining that the accusation against them has been made in error.

Furthermore, if the account holder does not know who did carry out the infringement, they should state in their reply that is the case. It is then up to ACS:Law to find the real infringer based on their evidence they hold. This is impossible for them without the account holder pointing the finger.

In justifying his application for the court order, Crossley said that they do it because “businesses are failing, jobs are being lost,” while citing dubious IFPI statistics (95% of all music is pirated) to justify his case.

CMW asked Crossley how long the scheme would continue for, who replied “…for as long as P2P file-sharing continues Master.”

Another NPO was applied for by ACS:Law on behalf of a new-comer to the scheme, a company called Media C.A.T. Ltd.

Little is known about them and their website is currently suspended, but searches reveal that the company is involved in the premium SMS market – one page states “Premium Rate Telephone Riches – How To Make £500 A Week” – quite what they have to do copyright holders and anti-piracy is unclear. It does appear, however, that their Managing Director Lee Bowden has previous links to Andrew Crossley and, just like him, will be in this for the money.

When CMW asked why rightsholders were dealing with Media C.A.T and not directly with DigiProtect, Crossley said that “[Media C.A.T] happen to operate in the UK…dealing with UK companies…”

In referring to the scheme ACS:Law and DigiProtect operate in respect of these hardcore porn titles, Crossley tried to suggest that they were doing a public service by helping to prevent the sharing of restricted movies on P2P.

CMW responded by noting that “[this is] not a moral crusade” and that in his opinion, ACS:Law and DigiProtect were doing this “…because you want the money.”

Recipients of past and future letters are invited to view the excellent BeingThreatened website, whose users provided invaluable help in compiling this report.

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

DL then wrote to the individuals demanding several hundred pounds to make the threat of a lawsuit disappear. Some paid up, but many did not, and the only cases DL took to court were against those who didn’t defend themselves.

Generating revenue from porn proves controversial

Then the law firm overplayed its hand and got into bed with DigiProtect, the German piracy exploitation outfit with a catalog of hardcore porn titles to its name. The rights were signed over to the company by the copyright holders so that DigiProtect could use them to generate revenue – lots and lots of revenue.

After mountains of bad publicity, DL withdrew from this business model. In May this year, the exact same scheme reappeared with UK lawyers ACS:Law. TorrentFreak asked company owner Andrew Crossley about the connections between ACS and DL – his reply: “NONE”. However, it was crystal clear that there were many links, not least that staff from DL were now working at ACS:Law directly on these cases – known cyber-squatter Terence Tsang as one example.

We’ve known all along that if those threatened put up a spirited defense and refused to be cowed they were never taken to court, but we had no proof as to the mechanism employed. Then, out of nowhere, months ago someone from inside either Davenport Lyons or DigiProtect leaked lots of sensitive documents to German news outlet Gulli.

Having remained secret until now, the documents made very interesting reading and along with a helping hand from TorrentFreak and armed with the leaked personal details and email addresses of some of the letter recipients, Firebird77 at Gulli was able to confirm the authenticity of the documents.

Document 1 – Ranking alleged infringers in order to decide who to pursue

The first document reveals how the targets are ranked based on an estimation of how likely it is that they will pay up. Each alleged infringer has their details filled in on a form (download here from WikiLeaks). The document shows that despite the claims that an IP address alone is irrefutable evidence of an infringement and will lead to being taken to court, the reality is rather different.

Letter recipients are given a ranking based on many parameters. Does the law firm want to continue to pursue the person? What are the chances of success? A zero would mean “no action” up to ten which would mean the respondent is ripe for maximum pressure. One letter recipient hired Michael Coyle at Lawdit Solicitors to defend him and this earned him a “three”.

One part of the form is entitled “Circumstances” and this is a very surprising section indeed. Despite the “fact” that the law firms supposedly already have solid evidence of infringement that they say will lead to court action if recipients don’t comply, the section seems to show that they make their decisions on who to pursue based on the recipients’ personal circumstances.

One circumstance is labeled “impecuniosity”, i.e the letter recipient is flat broke. Another is whether the recipient is on state benefits – this is expected to be proven by way of copies of benefit books and/or letters. TorrentFreak has evidence that one gentleman was asked to prove that he was indeed disabled in order to make the claims go away. Other circumstances include whether the recipient is a pensioner, a student or a child.

One other circumstance is an eyebrow-raising “out of jurisdiction” (no rightful claim could be made the against the recipient) along with whether or not the individual was aware of that fact.

The form also lists possible defenses that recipients rely on, including the breach of their wireless router, a virus infected PC, not being at home when the infringement occurred, no knowledge of infringement or the possibility that someone else in the location carried out the infringement.

Document 2 – Letter from lawyer Dr Kornmeier from Kornmeier & Partner to Brian Miller at Davenport Lyons

The 14 page document (download from WikiLeaks) details the agreement DigiProtect enters into with rights holders in order to exploit their copyrights for profit.

Included is a section which confirms that the original rights holders sign over the rights to DigiProtect so that they are legally allowed to make the works (hardcore porn movies) publicly available on P2P networks such as BitTorrent. Dr Kornmeier asks: “Does this constitute any problem under UK law?”

According to page 2 of the letter, when the recipient of these letters pay up, the spoils are divided up as follows – 51% to DigiProtect, 37.5% to Davenport Lyons and 11% to DigiRights Solutions. The remaining pages detail the exact business arrangement along with a list of the hundreds of porn movies covered by the agreement.

TorrentFreak discussed the documents with staff at the excellent BeingThreatened.com, a site set up to support and inform those targeted by Davenport Lyons and ACS:Law in the UK.

“These documents confirm what we have long suspected,” they told us. “This scheme is not about getting justice for the rightsholders at all; it is there to fill the pockets of companies like DigiProtect by exploiting many innocent people. Everyone with an IP address has reason to be worried about becoming a victim of these exploitative practices, whether they use P2P networks or not.”

Indeed, John Stagliano, boss of porn company Evil Angel which also worked with DigiProtect, admitted to earning less than £50 from each infringement and told the BBC the scheme “…was completely misrepresented” to him.

Uk consumer magazine Which? earlier reported Davenport Lyons to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority for alleged “bullying”. It will be interesting to see how these documents develop that case.

Thus far just two documents have been made public. Stay tuned for further updates.

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

“We get the legal rights from the companies to distribute these movies to stores, and with these rights we can sue illegal downloaders,” said Digiprotect’s account manager Thomas Hein as he explained how his operation works. “Then we take legal action in every country possible, concentrating on the places where such action will be profitable.”

“No one working for DigiProtect has a fixed salary. If we make money, everybody makes money. If we don’t, nobody does. This means the lawyers, sales people and customers. It’s all about how much money can be recouped and then sharing it,” he added, crucially.

And here lies the problem. According to lawyer Christian Solmecke of Wilde & Beuger law firm in Germany, the law requires such an operation to have an RVG agreement, which is part of the mechanism to regulate attorney’s fees. Since no-one can say how much the lawyers get paid, this causes difficulty.

“The interview creates the impression that no RVG agreement was entered into by DigiProtect and the law firms who admonish users [threaten with pay-up-or-else letters]. The report relating that the money thus earned is shared, rather suggests a success fee. Such an agreement is illegal. An admonishment based on it would equally be illegal and admonishing expenses would not have to be paid,” Solmecke notes.

DigiProtect have been pretty open about their aim of generating profit for their own company and their partners – indeed, its tagline is Turn Piracy Into Profit. This may also cause problems for their lawyer partners.

“If the admonishment serves solely the purpose of generating gains, it may furthermore be repudiated for reasons of abuse of legal right,” says Solmecke.

DigiProtect partners with lawyers ACS:Law in UK and presumably operates in a similar manner, sharing profits from those who ultimately pay up on the threats.

Update: Aldor Nini from Easycom contacted TorrentFreak with his view on this article. It’s a long read but interesting nonetheless

Our company develops end-user software, custom B2B solutions and sometimes we do also create software for anti-piracy purposes. We’re not related with DigiProtect, nor do we have any business or private relatinoship with them, but we’re very specialized in the German law together with our law-firm in Germany. The German RVG states, that the lawyer should be compensated by the RVG, that’s true. The RVG does also allow the lawyer to be compensated by additional charges like working hours for special tasks, this is also very usual.

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

The latest development is one that file-sharing commentators have quietly been expecting. While some 40-60% of those threatened over video game sharing in the UK appear to pay up, there are other ways of increasing this amount substantially via social leverage. Unsurprisingly, Davenport Lyons are now going down this road which is likely maximize compliance rates.

According to recipients of fresh letters this weekend, the lawyers have now expanded into movie ‘protection’ – a gay hardcore porn movie to be precise. Set on a farm in the former Czechoslovakia, Gestapo officers apparently hand out ‘forced’ punishment in ‘Army Fuckers‘, a 2006 movie originally released by Dutch porn outfit Dream Logistics BV, on the ‘Eurocreme‘ label.

Strangely, however, Dream Logistics BV aren’t the rights holder anymore, or the ones that hired Davenport Lyons. It appears the new rights holder is German anti-piracy company DigiProtect, who managed to get this High Court order for disclosure of alleged file-sharer’s identities, based on evidence provided by lesser-known anti-piracy tracking company DigiRights Solution, of Darmstadt, Germany. Indeed, DigiRights Solution GmbH appear to have no obvious Internet presence.

Davenport Lyons are demanding £500 compensation, plus the costs from the ISP for disclosing the alleged infringer’s personal details. Recipients of the letter are given 21 days to pay up and are threatened with huge court costs and damages if they don’t, which is no different to all the other threats made by Davenport on other media they ‘protect’. It is worth noting that of a claimed 25,000 threats of legal action, no more than half a dozen have gone to court and of those, none were contested, meaning that Davenport Lyons won default judgments on them all. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone has ever contested a case with many people simply refusing to pay up.

Those accused and deciding to settle are asked to sign an undertaking that they will never infringe copyright on any media owned by DigiProtect in the future, which might be easier than you think – considering the number of titles they own the rights to. As previously pointed out by P2P-Blog, DigiProtect seem to be acquiring the ‘P2P Rights’ to many titles (including those of US porn company ‘Evil Angel’) and gathering their money via P2P tracking and subsequent legal threats.

However, most worrying is the leaked contract between DigiProtect and Evil Angel, as it contains the following paragraph, which one would believe applies to these UK cases too:

To achieve the purpose outlined in clause 1, LICENSOR grants DIGIPROTECT the exclusive right to make the movies listed in Appendix 1 worldwide available to the public via remote computer networks, so-called peer-2-peer and internet file sharing networks such as e-Donkey, Kazaa, Bitorrent, etc. for the duration of this agreement

This destroys claims that these actions are for strict anti-piracy purposes, this is a clearly a money-making operation, designed from the ground-up.

Since most people will want to avoid lining the pockets of DigiProtect and friends, here is a list of titles that include those that appear to be now owned by DigiProtect and ripe for IP harvesting.

Although not DigiProtect titles, the eagle-eyed reader will notice the inclusion on this list of Dream Pinball 3D, Colin McRae Rally and Call of Juarez – all titles targeted by Davenport Lyons. According to the list, DigiProtect also owns the rights to Atari’s dire ‘Alone in the Dark 5′.

Of course, we live in a world that has become much more liberal in recent years, so the stigma attached to porn of all flavors has diminished significantly. However, the damage that will be done to a family will be considerable if someone is incorrectly accused of sharing porn that doesn’t ‘fit’ the acceptance levels in that household.

There is a firestorm coming, there can be little doubt, and a simple apology from Davenport Lyons following an incorrect accusation won’t be enough.

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