Anti-Piracy Lawyers 'Knew Letters Hit Innocents'

nk497 writes "A UK legal watchdog has claimed lawyers who sent out letters demanding settlement payments from alleged file-sharers knew they would end up hitting innocent people. The Solicitors Regulators Authority said the two Davenport Lyons lawyers 'knew that in conducting generic campaigns against those identified as IP holders whose IP numeric had been used for downloading or uploading of material that they might in such generic campaigns be targeting people innocent of any copyright breach.' The SRA also said the two lawyers lost their independence because they convinced right holders to allow them to act on their behalf by waiving hourly fees and instead taking a cut of the settlements. The pair earned £150,000 of the £370,000 collected from alleged file-sharers. Because they were looking to recoup their own costs, the lawyers ignored clients' concerns about the negative publicity the letter campaign could — and eventually did — cause, the SRA claimed."

Comments

I think Shakespear had it right

[DragonFodder]

Famous qoute, "First Kill all the lawyers" seems apropos.

And I know it probably wasn't what was intended within the context of the play, but it sure does seem correct now.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[mcgrew]

No, there are good lawyers, but bad lawyers like these give the other 1% a bad name.

List of good lawyers I know of:
Lawrence Lessig
NYCL
My divorce attorney
My bankrupcy attorney

Yeah, it's a short list, but still...

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, lawyers are good when they're on your side.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[cdrudge]

Just shoot the assholes like these and let the other animals learn from that.

The death penalty hasn't worked to deter extremely violent crimes. If it doesn't work for the scum of the earth, why do you think it would work for an even lower life form?

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[O('_')O_Bush]

The death penalty wasn't designed to deter extremely violent crimes. The death penalty was designed to remove extremely violent persons from our society. The same way killing lawyers is about removing those that are so corrupt that it is believed they cannot be rehabilitated.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[strength_of_10_men]

I'm not defending these lawyers, but isn't this "kill all lawyers"-kinda indiscriminate punishment very much akin to what these lawyers are doing and what we're all railing against in the first place?

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps his wife plunged him into ruinous debt and then decided to leave him to have sex with an unemployed young man.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[SuricouRaven]

And a successful lawyer knows that winning will define justice.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[internewt]

Honestly, what are the odds that a violent criminal will get the death penalty? Serial rapists can't unless they murder someone. A criminal who cuts off all the limbs of his victims can't get the death penalty unless one of the victims dies.

The Supreme Court found in Kennedy v. Louisiana that the victim must die for the death penalty to be an option. Basically you can rape and brutalize millions of women (and children!) knowing full well that the U.S. government cannot execute you kill one of the victims.

That, to me, is a tragedy.

To me, you are an immense hypocrite - like all the self-righteous who advocate the death penalty.

What you are saying is that to demonstrate it is wrong to kill someone, we should should kill people. Hmmm. And you go a step further saying that extreme violence should be dealt with with greater violence.

Way to build respect for the justice system! Though perhaps those that like to punish, rather than try to rehabilitate, want a disrespected justice system so that people are more likely to break laws, and so the punisher gets to punish? Fucking bullies.

Of course I will be modded down for this. I have had conversations with people from my country who think we should have the death penalty (usually justified with "think of the children"-type rhetoric, or other appeals to emotion), and when the hypocrisy of capital punishment is pointed out they tend to get irrationally pissed off. On /., this manifests itself as -1, Troll, or similar.

Even if you don't give a shit about other human beings (ie are a psychopath yourself) then the financial costs of building and maintaining an execution facility, the extra legwork necessary to prove undoubtedly that the accused is a killer (I hope you do that), the payouts necessary for when the innocent get killed, etc. are probably very similar to the costs of just locking the seriously fucked-up for life. Actually, I have no idea. I'm not going to look into it either, as an economic argument could never justify human lives to me.

Shit, murderers can contribute to the slave labour that US prisoners are used for too. You can't want to deny struggling international corporations some extra profit by killing killers? What are you, a commie?

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[scubamage]

One problem though; most death row inmates are not people with violent histories. Most of them are people who "snapped" at one point in time. It's also (as of the last time I had a prison studies class) the only portion of the prison strata where whites are more common than other races.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[lakeland]

Well yes, but you only have to look at other countries to see an alternative - e.g. Japan a few years ago or China now.

In the US contracts are long and complicated because the cost of a mistake is high. The other side is likely to also go through them with a fine toothed comb for loopholes, and legal recourse is expensive, slow and unpredictable. In other countries, businesses will not do business with you if you have a bad reputation so there is a strong disincentive from exploiting loopholes - meaning that the contracts can usually be reduced to a few pages or less and what's written there does not need to be triple checked for loopholes. Similarly other countries court systems are much cheaper so that a day in court will cost you hundreds of dollars.

So no, I don't think you could eliminate the profession, but I think the US has elevated it to a place that is unhealthy for the rest of the economy, and lowering them down a few pegs would have many more benefits than costs.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[girlintraining]

You have a very persuasive argument, except you neglect one minor detail: You assume people will take the moral high ground when money is involved. They usually don't. Lawyers aren't any different than Joe Q. Public on the street, excepting that they dress better, make somewhat more money, and (hopefully) are somewhat better trained for their professional field than most.

Additionally, your argument loses a lot of its intellectual purity and moral superiority when you make the reductio ad absurdum argument in paragraph two. Your post would have gone better without that.

Lastly, there is no transparency in the legal system and you're being intellectually dishonest to state otherwise: The legal system is incredibly complex and largely unavailable to the poor. When you have a system that necessitates the use of lawyers and attorneys in every legal preceding, to the point that attempting to advance a case pro se is laughed at by every judge and legal professional -- what then can we honestly say about transparency in the system? If the system requires experts that are licensed through the state to interpret or apply its rules, then the system is not transparent. In fact, it is utterly impervious to external examination, and any protests against it are swiftly dismissed as "uneducated" or rogue. The system is self-contradictory: Practicing law without a license is a criminal offense, but yet ignorance from the law is no excuse for breaking it.

You can be rid of the bastions of knowledge and reason – lawyers – only at the peril of the concept of principle itself.

This conclusion is fallacious. There are systems of justice for which lawyers and attorneys are forbidden from entry, and serve only their original role as counselors: Unable to act in any way on behalf of their clients or to have any direct influence over legal proceedings. These systems do not simply cease to function without oxford-educated people in expensive suits, and these systems generally avoid overly dense and burdensome legal texts because the participants are unable to interpret or use them in any meaningful capacity.

Lawyers should be optional, not a requirement, in the judicial process. Our system has become broken when it requires people charging several hundred or thousand dollars an hour to act as an "advocate" for their clients, and in the process creating a closed system for which money funnels in, and justice is an occasional byproduct of it, happening as much by coincidence as by design.

Re:I think Shakespear had it right

[Your.Master]

I'm also opposed to the death penalty, but I don't think the GP was actually inconsistent. You're showing an unusual preconception by declaring that execution of a single person is greater violence than serial rape and dismemberment. I think you might be able to make that argument, maybe, if there's only one victim, but I think cutting off the arms and legs of 100 people without killing them is easily more violent than killing one person.

You know it's wrong to kidnap people and lock them into cages, even though the main alternative to execution is to kidnap the criminal and lock them in a cage. For many, many years. With murderers and rapists. There's really nothing inconsistent about executing criminals, and I think it's hypocrisy to complain about killing people to demonstrate it's wrong to kill when we imprison people against their will to demonstrate that it's wrong to imprison people against their will.

I think the death penalty is wrong because we have a flawed justice system, because I believe in attempting rehabilitation, and because I think that even if the person is guilty and a lost cause, I think locking them in a cage forever -- with the option of suicide -- is sufficient to protect everybody since they are now removed from the pool of people that can commit crimes relatively easily. I do not consider the revenge motive, sufficient cause to kill somebody, even if it gives comfort to the victims; I'm invested in the justice system to protect everyone, not for vengeance. This is, I believe, a non-hypocritical position against the death penalty.

Also, you got a flamebait because you flamebaited, not because people just disagree. You called the GP these things:

1. Immense hypocrite (to be fair, I also called your argument hypocritical here, lest I be accused of hypocrisy).
2. Fucking bully.
3. Irrational.
4. Psychopath.
5. Commie (that one might have been a joke).

When really he only pointed out what appeared to him to be an inversion of severity.

Re:Haven't we known this all along?

[oldspewey]

doing something about it

Exactly. These lawyers are in real danger of receiving a sternly-worded rebuke.

Wow, Lawyers can't speak in English!

[IBBoard]

The Solicitors Regulators Authority said the two Davenport Lyons lawyers 'knew that in conducting generic campaigns against those identified as IP holders whose IP numeric had been used for downloading or uploading of material that they might in such generic campaigns be targeting people innocent of any copyright breach.'

(My highlighting)

"IP numeric"? "IP holders"? They obviously aren't techies or tech-aware...which makes you wonder how they can ever be trusted to know what they're doing with these legal threats. Oh, yes, that's right, the whole things is a bit dodgy anyway - that explains the lack of technical awareness.

I guess it was all sold to managers without a clue by lawyers without a clue, just a scent of blood (or money, whichever pays better).

Re:"...the lawyers ignored clients' concerns..."

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm assuming that this is some legal analog of that trope from just about every special operations/spy themed violence drama ever made: "We are sending you to do something dangerous and illegal and highly advantageous to us. If it goes well, congratulations all around and we weren't involved. If it goes poorly, we've never heard of you before, and if we had than you must have gone rogue and been acting without authorization and we have nothing to do with it..."

Re:I thought...

[Shrike82]

Don't hold your breath, I highly doubt that the entire legal profession will disappear overnight. Even less likely that the profession will stop attracting assholes who are ready to do anything at all for money, including victimising innocent people like these two and their compatriots at ACS:Law.

Re:"...the lawyers ignored clients' concerns..."

[delinear]

In this case it's not even that drastic. If it goes well, you'll make a ton of money and we'll nuke a few file sharers off the internet, if it goes badly you'll make a ton of money and probably get a slap on the wrist for your part in it.