BT steps up fight against legal firms as 'speculative invoicing' unravels
BT will on Wednsday take to the high court to fight government plans to curb illegal filesharing. A coalition of beleaguered rights owners will line up in opposition. An apposite time, then, for this industry's most controversial anti-filesharing cabal to be back in the news.
In a post on its customer forum on Tuesday evening, BT said that it had ordered DigiProtect and MediaCAT, two (very different) media companies used by notorious solicitors' firm ACS:Law, to delete thousands of its customers' details they received last year.
The two companies had issued a court order (known as a Norwich Pharmacal Order) for the information ? which includes telephone numbers and addresses of customers ? with the apparent intention of suing them for illegal filesharing, which we now know was probably unlikely.
BT said in the statement:
"With regard to Media CAT, we have been under a court order since July last year to supply them with details belonging to thousands more customers. We refused to do so and have now secured a further order to set aside the July order, meaning that the customer details will not be disclosed. Media CAT has also confirmed that all customer data that we sent to them in the past has now been deleted."
The UK's largest broadband provider has also escaped having to hand over thousands of customer details to Ministry of Sound, which applied for them back in May 2010 ? months before the whole ACS:Law row blew up. BT adds:
"Digiprotect was another client of ACS:Law. We have already disclosed some customer details to them under a court order in early 2010. Since even before the revelations about ACS:Law, we had been challenging Digiprotect on their use of that data but did not get satisfactory answers.
"We have now taken the matter back to court and secured an order requiring Digiprotect either to issue proceedings or delete the data. The time for issuing proceedings has now expired and the data should be deleted."
We rang DigiProtect on Tuesday afternoon to see whether the data had been deleted. We were told that Dr. Frederik Gerckens, the company's managing director, was "in a meeting" and that we should ring back on Wednesday. That we shall. In the meantime it would be interesting to know what power BT, based in the UK, will have over Digiprotect, based in Germany, to order the deletion of user data that it handed over ? and how it will be able to confirm that that deletion has been done. After all, how do you prove something isn't there?
All of this is bad news for so-called speculative invoicing schemes. While they were unashamedly lucrative for the solicitors' behind them ? reaping money from those accused of illegal filesharing, but who didn't want to face the embarrassment (many were charged with downloading adult films) of fighting the charges in court ? the long-term damage to these companies will likely outweigh the short-term spoils.
And that's before you ask big rights owners ? Paramount Pictures, Disney, 20th Century Fox etc. ? whether the row has sullied their cause. Back to BT:
"As a business we must facilitate genuine rights holders who wish to enforce their copyright in a proportionate way. With that in mind we have been working on a new framework policy to deal with future applications, in a bid to protect our customers.
"We continue to develop that policy, particularly in light of the comments of HHJ Birss QC in the recent Media CAT cases."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/mar/22/bt-acslaw-filesharing
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