It was only on the twenty sixth of January of the year 2010 that Lord Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall of the United Kingdom stood up for himself and announced to his fellow title holders within the House of Lords, that the new products of anti-P2P brainstorming were primarily serving as a travesty of justice.
When attended to in a civil standpoint, the situation seems a bit closer to blackmail. The cost of the required defense is considered to be around ten thousand pounds. You can easily get away with demanding five hundred to a thousand pounds and be actually paid on majority of the times that you do get to muster the confidence to ask. Basically, you get the money you demand for without any effort at all at establishing any guilt or whatsoever. Thus, it seems to be straightforward blackmail that is made legal.
In the United States of America, there is only a minimal amount of such lawyers who tend to look at the more entrepreneurial side of their lawyer jobs. Such copyright lawyers tend to send out hundreds upon thousands of letters just to be able to threaten expensive prosecutions if the alleged users of the P2P do not decide to settle for a huge amount of money. “Settle or we’ll sue your pants off”, is definitely a corrupted thought in the legal world, or in any world at that.
Most of the threats they send out through the mail come from certain trade groups, such as the RIAA. This group is much more interested on focusing on deterrence as well as education, as compared to profits. Furthermore, their record indicates that they have brought quite a lot of cases to the table when people did not decide to settle.
That is in the USA. In UK, however, the people are much more accustomed to such relatively unconventional lawyering acts. In fact, in the United Kingdom, there are quite a lot of law firms that go into the entrepreneurial side of their job by monetizing P2P, and earn a lot of money for themselves. The firm that is most known for such ventures is ACS Law, as it is run by a man under the name of Andrew Crossley.
The modus operandi sounds like this. They hire representatives for tracking the IP addresses through BitTorrent swarms. When they do finally find the addresses, they try to figure out the identities that are put beside the name of the ownership of those addresses. Afterwards, they start to send extremely rude letters that demand immediate payouts or else firm prosecutions will ensue. This is something that is presently being perfected by one of the known US firms, namely, Dunlap, Grubb &Weaver.
Crossley, the big man in question, actually boasts of being able to pull in more than a million pounds only in April through the aforementioned scheme. Despite the fact that the firms involved remain highly controversial for a certain list of reasons, many of the defendants still strongly claim, or feign, innocence, even if they are consistently bombarded with constituent complaints regarding the associated firms.
Notably, despite the fact that these firms have sent out thousands of letters in a week, sometimes even in one day, alone, they still have yet to sue anyone.
