- just a reminder too, tonight (Friday 16th July) the One Show BBC @ 7.00PM are covering this issue, a "must see" maybe.

:)

It says in the main thread to his subject that the BBC One show program about ACS Law is now being aired on Thursday 22 July @ 7.00pm.

Very true..... i think they will still send the threatening letters even if you dont reply. Not stating a simple letter of defence will allow them to joy ride to the letter of court summonings no doubt. As if they feel you are ignoring the letters, there is a high chance you'd ignore the summon and then they'd win a no show at court. better cheap stats for them.

 

but thats me just being paranoid haha

That not being paranoid, it's exactly how it works.

@ryedonny,

Check out the Code of Conduct for Pre-action Protocol in Interlectual Property Rights Disputes. In a nut shell, it provides guidelines on how the claiment should write their letter of claim and how a defendant should respond - basically with a letter accepting or denying the claim.

Then, once you have responded, as you said - stop panicking.

johnsmith999 explains it well on the previous page

Complaining to the SRA has been discussed on this thread going back to May 2009 - what are they investigating, and why is it taking so long?

 

I think it would be useful for one of you (who has complained about this so long ago) would consider making a FOI to get information about the investigation, the number of complaints received and details of what the investigation is and means to you all?

Hello car2403,

This person has made a number of FOI requests regarding ACS Law:

Kevin Howard - WhatDoTheyKnow

and according to Broadband Genie.co.uk on the 15 Jul 2010:

It would seem the SRA's investigation into ACS:Law's Andrew Crossley is into its final stages, with the final response it is waiting for due in at the end of July. Once in, the SRA will decide whether or not to proceed with a disciplinary tribunal

Theoretically people like ACS can you send you claim after claim after claim and make you bankrupt. The better option is to let the police knock your door and get a proper court case with a fine. This way it would be enough of a deterrent but not so much as to bankrupt you.

 

So just hang on in there and don't pay, wait for the adults to deal with it.

 

 

 

Woh,

They can't send claim after claim and make you bankrupt.

The police will not knock your door - this is a civil matter not criminal.

There is not going to be a court case or a fine.

In fact nothing is going to happen - they are just using a legal process to try their luck.

As for the adults dealing with it, apparently the SRA will be concluding their investigation by the end of July.

 

i phoned up my ISP which is o2 and they say they have no records of them releasing my details. on there document it states that my isp is BE UNLIMITED anyone have information on this?

Can't help with this.

the court order/application which is dated 17 feb 2010 also looks very dodgy to me. has anyone phoned up the court to verify there court order/application?

This court order is genuine, it's just been photocopied many times.

i plan to write an LOD letter, but should i also get in touch with citizen advice bureau?

Up to you, I have read on here that CAB have not been that helpful.

can i use this LOD example that user DANNY:BOI created or used, will there be a problem if i used this or is there another one i can use?

 

please make adjustment to the letter if needed

It's up to you adjust the template to suit your needs. They may write back saying "they don't accept your letter as it is based on template available on the internet" There is no legal reason as to why you shouldn't use a template. Anyway their letters are templates.

I would also recommend spending some time reading through this thread - all of your questions are answered within.

Regards

Not true. data can be recovered from a HDD fragment measuring a tiny size.

Thats why I said lose the bits?

Anyway we are getting away from the main point I was trying to make, which was that as this is a civil case, people don't need to worry about destroying/formatting drives.

Sorry, HenriIV had already answered while I was typing!

It's worth noting that Bridget Prentice MP (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in Feb 2010) in a letter to Lord Young (Minister for Postal Affairs and Employment Relations) wrote:

"It may be helpful to say to recipients of a letter from ACS Law who are satisfied they have no liability whatsoever in respect of the issues raised, that it is open to them to inform ACS Law that they are not liable and do not intend to reply to any further correspondance, save to defend a claim should one be bought."

Please could anybody explain why ignoring such letters would be a bad thing? There is a lot of discussion on here about the LOD's but not much about actually ignoring them in the first place - if their letters didn't arrive surely there is nothing to respond to.

 

Are there any disadvantages in ignoring?

 

Cheers

The letters , however unreasonable they seem, are legitimate claims (although based on suspect evidence) made in accordance with The code of Practice for Pre-Action Conduct in Intellectual Property Disputes. This code requires that the "defendant" should provide a written response.

It's obviously up to the individual what they do but IMO should one of these claims ever get to court, a dim view would be taken by the Magistrates if the defendant had not , as a minimum, replied with a denial and hence discharged his duties to comply with the code of conduct.

Whats bothering me about this is the lack of information about this monitoring software, bearing in mind that these NPO's are granted based on the evidence obtained from it, I wander if there is some kind of industry standard or quality requirments that this software is required to conform to? Surely there should be if it is used evidentually.

[...]What it is thought they do is enter a P2P network and broadcast they want certain files from the company they are acting on behalf of, any uploads to their computers are logged (ip address, client software and time stamp).

Yeah, that all makes sense. Also, I do remember reading somewhere that an adapted torrent client was being used?

However they do it - it doesn't seem that accurate does it?! On the date they accuse me of this, we only had a Wii console connected to the router!

So they actually are monitoring data transfer, and not just getting the IP addresses of the swarm? That's a more honest strategy than what I assumed these companies were up to

To be honest I don't know for sure - I just think it's more than coincidence that ACS reveiled their IT experts as NG3 Systems Ltd who also happen to be advertising a DPI program on their site.

For all the people asking about "deep packet inspection" this is a form of interception mainly used by ISP's if they are monitoring what somebody is doing, it has to be based at the ISP because all of their traffic flows through.

 

Deep packet inspection is useless for what these monitoring companies do as the computer they are talking to over a P2P network sends the complete packet to their computer anyway, so they have the full packet anyway (A packet is the way computers send info to each other) why would they need to snoop on it again?

So they can do it remotely? ie inspect the traffic between a known host (the file seeder) and the clients that connect to it to (the download/uplaoder) - it would make sense to do it this way as it guarantees that the host remains anonymous.

 

Is there any evidence that Deep packet inspection is actually being used? I would imagine that they are just joining a swarm, collecting IP addresses and then maybe seeing if the IP addresses collected actually offer chunks of the file for uplaod / downlaod.

 

They may just be collecting the IP addresses and not even checking anything else.

 

I think that DPI would more likely happen in the case of the ISP like Virgin are currently trialing.

A while back letters from ACS Law provided details of the "forensic IT specialists" - namely NG3 Systems Limited. It is thought that the program used is the one advertised on their website:

eyeNet

eyeNet Is a Powerful & Fast Traffic Analayser Featuring DPI - Deep Packet Inspection Technology

There is more info on this (rather dodgy looking) company further back in this thread - since this information was published on here, ACS Law have stopped providing their details in the recent letters.

Metallica eh? now we're talking! A bit of "And justice for all" would be nice!!!!

my husband is cisco networker, this brings your hard drive down to bulls**t binary

I don't disbelive it's effectiveness. Where I work the disks get physically destroyed, and for good reason.

just noticed too, that gallant and macmillan hired a new guy on the 6th of july, diggin deeper now, woohoo!

Carefull - investigating this can become a hobby!!

Active@ Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser. Low Level Format. for those of u who did do it xxx

Ha!

Nobody needs to be formatting hardrives, as this is a civil matter they can't demand your pc for forensic examination. Anyway an IT forensic team would be able to recover the data from a drive after formating at low level. The only way to truly prevent recovery it is to physically destroy the disks medevil style (a hammer and screwdriver) and lose the bits in a scrap yard.

Hi,

 

[is] it is in any way possible that this software company could have recorded the MAC address of the particular machine the file was downloaded to?

No

The software uses a technique called deep packet inspection.

In a nutshell, data is sent across networks is in "chunks" called packets. Each packet contains a piece of the data to be transfered, a header which contains addressing information - the ip address of the sender and receiver, and various other things for error checking and stuff...As these packets arrive at the destination they get reconstituted at the receiver.

The monitoring software makes a file available for download and then intercepts the packets being sent to the downloader while extracting from the header of the packets, the recipients (uploaders) IP address. Over a period of time they gather a number of IP addresses with which they populate a speadsheet along with details of the file and the date and time. The spreadsheet gets sent to the solicitor who then obtains a court order to have the ISPs release the details of the account holders to whom those ip adresses were allocated to at the time.

Clear as mud?!

So like everyone else I should complete a LOD and send to them ?? They still can't prove that it was anyone in my household ??

There is no technical way in which they can determine who, if anyone, downloaded, stored or uploaded a file to, on or from your PC.

More importantly they can't prove that you as the account holder did it or authorised anyone to.

Thanks tp123, I havent got a clue when it comes to computers hence the mess i have found myself in!!!

No worries mate. Just send a letter saying it wasn't you and that you didn't authorise anyone esle to, and you'll be fine. I posted a sample letter a few pages back.

I no everyone who has had letters from asc say that nobody has been taken to court after sending their letter of denial but gm has only sent out 7000 letters where as acs supposedly sent 30,000!!

 

Does anyone think because they didnt send out as many there is more of a chance they would take you to court??

The piece of law they rely on, namely the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Chapter II 16 (2), says;

“Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who without the licence of the copyright owner does, or authorises another to do, any of the acts restricted by the copyright.”

They have NO evidence that you, (a person) infringed the "work". Nor do they have evidence that you authorised another to infringe copyright.

What they do have is an ip address which was allocated to an internet enabled hardware device at the time an alleged infrigment took place. Unless they were able to physically observe you, or any person, using that device to make the work available to third parties they have no evidence at all.

If they were to procede to court with one of these cases, I would eat my hat.

If they were to win, I would s**t it out and gladly eat it again!

i spoke to the the soliciters gallant mcmillan yesterday and they said they posted 7000 letters out

So if just 20% of people pay, 1400 x £375 = £525,000

Half a million for some creative letter writing!

[...]also the fact that the internet is addressed to one person - EDIT - not a person, a device - but anyone could have downloaded it, does it make the bill owner liable? ive dealt with solicitors once and they were quite professional. these lot seem like [problem] artists who've hired some whizzkid geek who knows a bit about computers. decided to target peoples ips willy nilly and seem to think that is concrete evidence demanding 37 times the amount of the actual price of the cd. [...]

Ha ha - You've got it spot on mate!

However shaky their evidence and imoral their practices, it is in fact not a [problem] but a scheme that employes Civil Procedure Rules. Pre-action protocol and peoples' fear and ignorance as tools to extort money.

 

I've contacted Sky who said that they did pass my information onto ACS Law, but that was on 15th April, whereas the stamp on the High Court of Justice Document is dated 17th February. That doesn't really add up?

ACS Law obtained a court order for Sky (and other ISPs) to provide the names and addresses of ip address holders on the 17th Feb. The ISPs had to provide this information within a specified time. It seems that Sky provided it on the 15th April.

I am not sure on the technicalities of the infrigement if it concerns individual tracks from a an album, for example; if you downloaded multiple tracks from an album, but not the track ACS refer to in the letter.

Regarding the time issue, I believe they make the file available for download for a long period time in order to "catch" more victims. For this reason, I'm sure the times and dates will vary for individuals. The "work" I was accused of making available[...] last year, is still available for download as of last week!

As I said previously, if you have infinged copyright, seek legal advice with a view to making a counter offer for an amount in the region of about £20. Check out Michael Coyle at Lawdit Solicitors - they specialise in this area.

Bear in mind though that NO ONE HAS BEEN TAKEN TO COURT. What evidence do they have that YOU as an indivdual made the "work" available to third parties or authorised anyone else to do so? NONE

Regards

@TudorBlue and mos lawsuit!!

If you did download, or more accurately, make the "work" available to third parties via p2p networks, the sum of money claimed is dispraportionate to the potential loss of sales for the rights holder.

I would seek legal advice with a view to making a counter offer for an amount in the region of about £20.

Check out Michael Coyle at Lawdit Solicitors - they specialise in this area.

regards

tp123

[...]Will they be able to take this away even though I purchased it in March 2010 [...] I just do not want them to take away my new laptop!

This is a civil case. They can't take anything away.

The only "evidence" they have is an ip address that was gathered via a piece of software that employs a tehnique called deep packet inspection. This effectlvley and in very simple terms, intercepts data flowing between two points, and from that discovers the ip address. There are however, many explanations as to how an ip address can be incorrectly gathered.

This "evidence" has never been tested in a court and is extremley unlikely to be, for many reasons.

Don't panic