An object lesson for Senator Conroy.........

In December last year the BBC One Watchdog program outed legal firm Davenport Lyons for sending threatening letters to individuals with home internet connections (operating open WiFi networks) demanding sums in the vicinity of £500-£600 for alleged infringement of copyright.

These letters of demand were adamant that copyright breaches had occurred, even though it later found that it was in the wrong because either the downloading was proven not to have occurred on the PC in question or the stated IP addresses were incomplete or fake.

Now Davenport Lyons went so far as to make application to the UK High Court to start this extortion-like process off and it quickly descended into the ridiculous:

15. At 8:50pm on 08 Dec 2008, ebvjb45 wrote:

I also received one of these letters accusing me of uploading and making available a po*rn film called ************. As a happily married pensioner of 64 years old I ask you!. After plowing through the documentation I spotted one or two items that are either missing or incorrect.
It would appear that although they have my full postal address they do not have my name! The letter and documentation is addressed by name to ?Provider, Royal Mail Holdings PLC? If they do not use my name or appear to know it how on earth can they carry out any threats of court actions?
For me they list that the upload was done using three different IP Addresses, but all at the same time! As I understand it, my ISP issues me with single new IP address dynamically each time I reconnect to the internet (NOT THREE). As I use an ADSL Network Router that IP Address remains allocated to me till I switch off the router or disconnect it from the telephone line. The router is left switched on for weeks at a time. This throws some doubts on their data gathering reliability.
Doing a Google search on the name Davenport Lyons brings up some interesting facts about this company. After reading the comments about them and their ways of doing things I am certainly not going to be paying them a settlement. I will wait till they try to take me to court and fight it there.
Needless to say I have not seen this video, downloaded it or uploaded it.

It would have been most useful had Watchdog named the Lawyer who is representing the 400 people who received these demand letters, as I would like to make that figure up to 401 with my name. [Quote has been edited to avoid blocking by filters]

This law firm is apparently threatening Wikileaks for online publishing an example of the questionable letter of demand.

This is what Wikileaks has additionally published concerning how Davenport Lyons 'found' its information:

The legal threat letters themselves contain a hash value, and IP address and a time stamp that is being used as evidence – flimsy evidence according to many people who have observed the legal side of file-sharing. The reason it is seen as flimsy is that a filename can be called anything and still have the same hash value. Second of all, there is no evidence provided that verified that the file name matched what the actual work was. For all we know, it could have been a 5 minute porn clip rather than a music video. Thirdly, there's no evidence to suggest that an IP address is linked to an individual. The computer could be used by someone other than the owner of the connection. There could be a wifi connection that other users, including unauthorized ones, could be using that IP address. Finally, a time stamp doesn't contribute much into proving that a copyrighted work has been uploaded. The alleged incident in question happened over BitTorrent, but no website was given, so who really knows where the evidence was gathered in the first place?

A Davenport Lyons letter threatening the whistleblower with legal action was sent out this month.

This may be a response to the fact that it appears that Which? consumer group is now taking Davenport Lyons to court.

As the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, pursues his plan to censor the Internet in an effort to meet the corporate aims of both the IT security and entertainment industries he should perhaps ponder what bullying monsters he might be letting loose on Australian society.

Particularly as the Federal Government's own agency ACMA is operating in almost complete secrecy in creating its blacklist.

Senator Conroy may give assurances that the government will not be pursuing Internet account holders who appear to breach the ISP-level filter (if such a scheme is implemented), but there is no assurance that the client information which would have to be held by these ISPs will not be abused in the future.