While we have covered developments with these type of schemes closely here on TorrentFreak with numerous Davenport Lyons, ACS:Law and latterly TBI articles, there are other sites which concentrate purely on them. The excellent BeingThreatened consumer site is an excellent resource, but for those who prefer a more tabloid-style take on events, the ACSBore blog can be quite an eye-opener.

After an earlier site, BeingScammed, was threatened by ACS:Law and was eventually taken down, a guy called ‘Hickster’ – himself wrongfully accused of file-sharing by the company – became motivated to launch a replacement.

“Really the aim of the site is to put pressure on the law firms that are falsely accusing people of filesharing,” Hickster told TorrentFreak.

“Imagine when an internet connection is in a wife’s name and she receives a letter from these people accusing her of downloading and watching some vile pornography. I mean does she look at her husband in the same manner? Especially when it is gay pornography, what could that do to a marriage?”

Although Hickster maintains that he only publishes the truth, he does admit that his blog takes a ‘Red-Top Tabloid” approach. Anyone familiar with the British tabloids will know that they are not averse to a bit of image Photoshopping should the need arise, and it is that type of activity that has caused Tilly Bailey & Irvine to complain about the ACSBore blog.

Back in January we reported that Lord Lucas had labeled the type of scheme run by these law firms as “straightforward legal blackmail“. It was this statement that inspired Hickster into action.

After culling a photograph from the FaceBook page of a lawyer who handled file-sharing cases at TBI, Hickster transformed it into a Wild-West style ‘Wanted’ poster which declared “Wanted: For Legal BlackMail” and offered a $1000 reward – an amount similar to the settlement fees demanded by these companies. This image was then included in an article on his WordPress-hosted blog.

This week in correspondence with WordPress, Tilly Bailey & Irvine complained about the image claiming “Copyright Infringement and Libellous statements”. The section describing the complaint reads:

The copyright image of Ms Amanda Mitten is framed in a ‘Wanted’ poster with the word “Wanted for Legal Blackmail”. We consider this statement to be defamatory in terms of the wording used and the way in which the copyright image has been framed in a ‘Wanted’ poster. There is no truth in the statement that Amanda Mitten personally or Tilly Bailey & Irvine LLP has been involved in “Legal Blackmail”. Such a statement is misleading and false.

This blog entry can be viewed by general members of the public who have access to the internet and as such cause injury to the reputation of Ms Mitten. This blog entry has caused great distress to Ms Mitten personally. It is generally accepted under English law that defamatory statements on web pages are to be regarded as libel.

The company also claims that the displaying of the image constitutes copyright infringement and goes on to state that as the publisher Automattic, Inc. can be held liable for defamation. TBI then formally put the company “on notice of our claim for copyright infringement and defamation” while demanding an immediate takedown of the image.

Interestingly, TBI then threatened to use a Norwich Pharamacal Order against Automattic, Inc. to obtain the identity of Hickster – the same technique it used to obtain the identities of alleged file-sharers – so it can take further action against him. Although the WordPress operator took down the image, it isn’t going to play games with their users’ identities.

“We only dealt with the DMCA notice contained within the e-mail sent to us,” said WordPress in correspondence. “We will not, under any circumstance, disclose any contact/personal/private details of our bloggers without a U.S. Court Order, and this has not been presented to us.”

This isn’t the first time that Hickster’s actions have drawn the attention of lawyers acting against file-sharers in the UK. He was named in the legal threat made by ACS:Law to file-sharing forum Slyck.com earlier this year, after he referred to a law firm employee as “a wanker“

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

Since TBI has been around for some 170 years, appeared to be a traditional law firm with previously good reputation, but was now publicly representing porn-industry clients in a controversial practice, TorrentFreak earlier asked the company the following question:

“Taking into consideration that when operating almost identical schemes both ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons became the subject of SRA investigations, coupled with the Lords labeling this type of scheme “legal blackmail“, are Tilly Bailey & Irvine concerned about tarnishing their hard-earned reputation?”

TBI declined to answer this and the rest of our questions but were quickly labeled by the UK Lords discussing the Digital Economy Bill as “new entrants to the hall of infamy” and their activities labeled “an embarrassment to the rest of the creative rights industry”.

The pressure continued to build when settlement letter recipients wrote complaints to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) so it didn’t really come as a surprise when we discovered TBI had been trying to re-write history by modifying their Wikipedia page recently.

At the time we wondered if this meant the company had abandoned its action against file-sharers. That question has now been answered by UK consumer group Which?

In a letter sent to the SRA on April 1, TBI wrote: “We have been surprised and disappointed at the amount of adverse publicity that our firm has attracted in relation to this work and the extra time and resources that have been required to deal solely with this issue.

We are concerned that the adverse publicity could affect other areas of our practice and therefore following discussions with our clients, we have reluctantly agreed that we will cease sending out further letters of claim.”

Deborah Prince, head of in-house legal at Which? said that she is really pleased that TBI has seen sense and left this arena.

“Hopefully, other law firms thinking of going down a similar route will begin to realise that although this work can generate vast financial rewards for law firms and their clients, it can also bring a lot of adverse publicity simply because the practice is inherently unfair and unethical.”

Consumer group BeingThreatened.com, who have worked relentlessly to assist those sent letters by TBI, ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons, also welcome the news, but want TBI to go further.

“We are cautiously optimistic that it marks the end for the innocent people who have been in touch with us to complain of the accusations. However, we believe that an apology is owed to those individuals, and would encourage TBI to come forward and say sorry,” they told TorrentFreak

“They’ve already taken the difficult step of admitting to their error, this extra step would serve to restore some confidence that the legal system is not merely there to be abused for making money through volume litigation against the innocent and unaware.”

With this announcement by TBI, only ACS:Law remain in this type of business in the UK, so are they concerned about damage to their reputation? Absolutely not. We’ll go into more details in our report next week.

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

We’re used to receiving these type of emails – we’ve been having them in one shape or another since Davenport Lyons (DL) started sending them out in 2007, and more recently from recipients of letters from ACS:Law.

Founded in 1841, Tilly Bailey & Irvine (TBI) are a law firm based in the North East of England and from what we’ve seen thus far in respect of this business, their modus operandi appears to have much in common with those of DL and ACS.

On January 27th/28th 2010 in the name of Media & More GmbH & Co, TBI successfully obtained a court order against ISP BT who, as usual (and unlike ISP TalkTalk which refuses to comply with these orders), simply rolled over and complied, handing over the personal details of their customers to TBI in super-quick time and charging £12,500 for the service.

In common with ACS, Tilly Bailey & Irvine are in bed with pornographers.

One outfit confirmed as a client of TBI is Golden Eye (International) Ltd, a company connected with the Ben Dover porn brand in the UK and one that has already been pursuing alleged file-sharers in Germany for the movie “Fancy An Indian – Five Spicy Dishes Covered In A Hot Creamy Sauce.” Media & More GmbH & Co have disputes in Germany with the movie “The Babysitter # 8 Cute Cock Craving Girls!”

Unusually for these type of cases, TBI send their letters by recorded delivery, an expense avoided by DL and ACS. TBI want more money than their counterparts too – £800 – but like Davenport Lyons threaten to enforce the debt against a non-payers property. They also suggest they have criminal remedies open to them which is typical of the usual heavy-handed and disproportionate psychological warfare tactics we’ve come to expect in these cases.

Those who choose to pay up are asked to sign ‘undertakings’ that they will refrain from certain things in future, one of which is to keep the terms of any settlement “secret”.

The claim letters also contain selected pages from a 160 ‘expert report’ created by
Projective Expert Group on behalf of Media Protector GmbH, the company whose ‘FileWatch‘ system was used to capture evidence used in the claim. In all cases we’ve seen thus far the allegations are connected to the eD2K network. The system appears to differ somewhat from those used previously to log alleged BitTorrent infringers and will be dissected in a future article.

TorrentFreak contacted Amanda Mitten, a lawyer in the ‘Intellectual Property Team’ at Tilly Bailey & Irvine dealing with these cases. In addition to asking how many letters the company intends to send out and a request for a list of movie titles to be claimed on, we asked some other key questions, including;

- Will TBI really “commence proceedings” within 14 days if people don’t pay up? [ACS has claimed the same but thus far has taken no-one to court]
- Can we have a full copy of the ‘expert’s report’ on the FileWatch system?
- How will the evidence identify an infringer behind an IP address and not just a bill payer? How does TBI justify claiming against a bill payer when they’re not certain he or she is an infringer?
- How do those accused go about proving a negative, i.e they didn’t carry out the infringement TBI claim they did? [this point was raised by the Lords recently]
- The letters being sent out by TBI are similar to those sent out by ACS and very, very similar to those sent out by Davenport Lyons. We earlier asked ACS if they were connected to DL – they said “NO”, but that wasn’t exactly true. We asked TBI if they are in anyway connected to either ACS or DL.
- Taking into consideration that when operating almost identical schemes both ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons became the subject of SRA investigations, coupled with the Lords labeling this type of scheme “legal blackmail“, are Tilly Bailey & Irvine concerned about tarnishing their hard-earned reputation?

After emails back and forth, mostly spent talking about TorrentFreak and the nature of this website, Tilly Bailey & Irvine refused to answer any of our questions.

Nevertheless, as expected their activities haven’t gone unnoticed and are already the subject of discussion by the Lords in the Digital Economy Bill debate, with Tilly Bailey & Irvine being mentioned by name yesterday. Lord Clement Jones labeled them, ACS:Law and the Logistep data-gathering outfit “an embarrassment to the rest of the creative rights industry.”

Baroness Howe of Idlicote said that the problem “has to be dealt with and is disgraceful,” adding, “If these firms really are law firms, they are bringing their whole profession into disrepute.”

Lord Lucas gave a very accurate overview of the schemes noting that they “must not be allowed to continue.” His contribution is detailed in its entirety over on our sister site, FreakBits.com.

We will follow this post up in due course with a closer look at the companies, people and tracking system involved in this business model, so if you have any information and would like to contribute (German contributors and eD2k specialists especially welcome), please contact us in the usual manner.

Worried letter recipients can visit BeingThreatened for more advice.

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