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Originally Posted by HarryT
That's the limit of the law as it currently stands. In steps 4 and 6, evidence has to be presented to a court, just as it did under previous legislation. There's no change in the burden of guilt: it's still "innocent until proven guilty". Really the only change that the DEA makes is steps 1-3. A rights-holder accusing someone of copyright infringement has to provide exactly the same evidence to a court as they would have done previously.
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The intention is not to take people to court individually, that is far too time consuming and costly. The intention (as we have already seen), is to threaten to take people to court unless they pay up. This introduces an official way of getting the ISP to tell a subscriber that they have broken the law.
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Perhaps many, maybe more of the recipients of these letters have been squarely infringing the copyright of Sheptonhurst on a major scale and know that they have been doing exactly that. They may think £495 is a small price to pay and settled immediately. That is a matter for them. However it is easy for seasoned lawyers to under-estimate the effect a letter of this kind could have on ordinary members of the public. This court's office has had telephone calls from people in tears having received correspondence from ACS:Law on behalf of Media CAT . Clearly a recipient of a letter like this needs to take urgent and specialist legal advice. Obviously many people do not and find it very difficult to do so. Some people will be tempted to pay, regardless of whether they think they have actually done anything, simply because of the desire to avoid embarrassment and publicity given that the allegation is about pornography. Others may take the view that it all looks and sounds very official and rather than conduct a legal fight they cannot afford, they will pay £495. After all the letter refers to an order of the High Court which identified them in the first place. Lay members of the public will not know the intricacies of the Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction. They will not appreciate that the court order is not based on a finding of infringement at all.
One odd thing is that if tens of thousands of letters have been sent threatening legal action, where are all the legal actions? The Patents County Court is clearly an appropriate court to bring a claim against an individual for copyright infringement and yet there are only 27 cases pending. Surely out of 10,000 letters it cannot be that only 27 recipients refused to pay.
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