"Straightforward legal blackmail": a tale of P2P lawyering

On January 26, 2010, the UK's Lord Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall—yes, it's a real title—stood up and told his fellow peers in the House of Lords that the new crop of anti-P2P "settle or we'll sue your trousers off" warning letters were a travesty of justice. "In a civil procedure on a technical matter, it amounts to blackmail," thundered the libertarian lord-slash-blogger. "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." The US has had limited experience with the more "entrepreneurial" sorts of copyright lawyers, the ones who send out tens of thousands of letters and threaten expensive prosecutions if alleged P2P users don't settle first for a significant fee. Most such letters on this side of the Atlantic Ocean have come from trade groups like the RIAA who were more interested in education and deterrence than profits (and who actually brought hundreds of cases when people did not choose to settle). But the UK has had much longer experience with small law firms who go into the business as a way to "monetize" P2P (and make a load of cash for themselves). The best known of the lot is currently ACS Law, a firm run by one Andrew Crossley. Crossley's modus operandi mirrors the work currently being done in the US by lawyers like Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver: track IP addresses in BitTorrent swarms, unmask the identities behind them, then send stern letters demanding immediate payouts or tough prosecutions will ensue. Crossley claimed in April to have pulled in more than £1 million to date through the scheme.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/straightforward-legal-blackmail-a-tale-of-p2p-lawyering.ars