April 19th, 2011
It has been a bad week for the supporters of three strikes copyright policies in Europe. Although at some point last year the panorama looked good for them with the enactment of the Digital Economy Act, it seems like recent legal developments will make it considerably harder for a comprehensive disconnection programme to take off.
Yesterday the Patents County Court in England and Wales delivered a damning ruling against ACS:Law, those of Anonymous fame. Andrew Crossley, the principal actor in ACS:Law, had found a nice little business niche by becoming the representative of Media CAT Ltd, a UK firm claiming to represent various porn films. ACS:Law would try to find people who were downloading those films at any given time through torrent sites, and then would issue the alleged infringers with harassing letters asking them to settle out of court. In many cases, people would pay up to £700 GBP just to have the allegations go away, even if untrue. In the case of Media CAT Ltd v Adams & Ors [2011] EWPCC 10, Media CAT accused several people of infringing pornographic material. This probably would have been dismissed in a normal fashion at an early stage, but the added publicity from the Anonymous stunt last year meant that ACS:Law was under added scrutiny. Instead of dismissing the case in February 2011, Judge Birss QC continued proceedings, asking Media CAT to demonstrate that it was a copyright society and that it truly represented their copyright interest of the offended parties in the UK. In an earlier ruling, Judge Birss opined that Media CAT had no standing to bring the proceedings, and even considered issuing an order against Media CAT sending out more harassing letters, but instead asked them to attempt to join the copyright orders to continue proceedings. In other words, Judge Birss found out that the entire business model of ACS:Law rested on fictitious ground, and asked them to put up or face the consequences.