Last Sunday BBC’s 5 Live Investigates looked into the practices of the “now defunct” anti-piracy lawyers of ACS:LAW. TorrentFreak helped a bit with the report which also features some juicy quotes a former employee of the law firm.
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“I was a paralegal. My specialism is copyright law, and I thought that by taking a job at ACS, I would be working for copyright owners and protecting their property. But after working there for a short time I realized what was going on, and it wasn’t very nice.”
“I was answering the phones and talking to people who’d been sent these letters. What I gradually became aware of is that some people were clearly not guilty. Some of them were for instance old ladies who never downloaded files. They just didn’t have security on their wireless connection. And some of the people ringing up came from pretty bad circumstances.”
“The tone of the letters in particular. They were very back and white. We were told that these people had infringed copyright, that they had downloaded copyright material and had made it available for others to do the same. But when you spoke to a lot of these people, it wasn’t so clear cut that they’d done anything wrong. And yet we were supposed to portray the case as being cut and dried.”
“I started to question how the information they had infringed was found. And how did we know that the evidence would stand up in court? It wasn’t something I thought was ethical, I just didn’t agree with it. What we were told is that we were acting for our client’s best interests. But it’s difficult to remember that when you talk to people who are so upset.”
“It was awful, absolutely awful.”
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The podcast is available (worldwide) on the BBC site for those who missed it (starting at 05:10).
