Slashdot Mirror
Lawyer Banned for Threatening File-Sharers
S. Hare brings us a report from TorrentFreak about a lawyer working for a Swiss anti-piracy group who was recently given a 6-month ban for her attempts to intimidate file-sharers though letters threatening fines and court fees. Elizabeth Martin demanded 400 Euros each from "hundreds of thousands of file-sharers," and suggested that they would have to face large settlements if they did not comply. The Paris Bar Council took exception to this and instituted the ban. Martin worked for Logistep, a company who has had trouble following laws in the past.
"The disciplinary board decided that 'By choosing to reproduce aggressive foreign methods, intended to force payments, the interested party also violated [the code] which specifies that the lawyer cannot unfairly represent a situation or seriousness of threat.' In addition, the lawyer also violated the code by cashing payments into a private account, not the usual dedicated litigation account, known as a 'Carpa'. Martin also refused to reveal how many payments had been received from file-sharers."
Should not such an act as this hold a penalty of disbarment?
This is only another situation that shows there is no position a human can hold that prevents him from committing some deception against others.
It is because of such evidence that some positions of power should be eliminated or have built-in checks that would at least require wide scope and unlikely collusion to perform.
Especially those positions of initiating war.
In much writing things are still going to take a while. Peer review takes time, because peer reviewers have busy lives. Doing fine typesetting is still a laborious task (yes, computers help, but you still have to painstakingly tweak their output).
Still, for some forms of entertainment, things do move fast, and once things are out they can be quickly duplicated. But in fact, they have always moved fast and copyright was an unnatural innovation forced into the the market only a few hundred years ago. In Ancient Rome, for instance, people would transcribe poetry recitals, have copies mass-produced by a team of amanuenses, and then sell it in the marketplace. No one seems to have had a problem with this lightning-speed duplication and sale of material. In his Epigrams , the poet Martial complains only that someone else was putting his own name on his poems, but he had no problem with people profiting from the poetry itself, even if he didn't see a dime. The arts flourished even without copyright.
The digital era has brought nothing new in many respects. Art just fine existed before copyright, and we should dismantle it now because it will exist after copyright.
A friend of mine had a kid sister who got in with some bad friends, and was involved in some apparent shop lifting shenanigans at the local mall. She never stole anything, but her friends did, and this was made pretty clear with store management, so nothing ever came of it.
A few months later they get a letter from a law firm in Tennessee (they live in Canada), threatening to sue unless they turned over $500. My friend's family was quite intimidated, and was even ready to fork over the cash until I wrote them a letter for them in response. I basically told them to fuck off, and that if they wanted to pursue charges we would see them in court.
The knew full well that there isn't a lick of evidence that my friend's sister ever stole anything, they also know that there's no fricking way they're going to go through all the trouble of getting a local (Canadian) law firm to sue. It was all one big scare tactic.
And people wonder why lawyers are so hated.
I've done professional typesetting with LaTeX. Yes, the TeX world is a wonderful, but you still have to laborious tweak the output. LaTeX will, for example, put a single word on a line at the end of a paragraph, a taboo. You also have to remove overfull \hboxes, ensure that hyphenation of proper names is correct, and work out any issues with non-Latin characters (UTF-8 is only partially supported in the TeX world, even with xetex).
I'm no lawyer and I don't know anything about the French legal system --- but I think it is fairly rare for a lawyer to get a ban and this will look bad on his CV, and I'm pretty sure the penalties will get heavier for repeat offense or copycats.
It would also be interesting to see whether some of the threatened people are willing to take civil action...
Why is she getting just banned, as opposed to sued? IANAL, and if I were to go around sending settlement requests to thousands of people, there must be some law that could be used to stop me.
Is she being treated more lightly just because she's a lawyer?