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Sky say they’ll no longer cooperate with ACS:Law

By | Published on Wednesday 29 September 2010

BSkyB has said it will no longer cooperate with London-based ACS:Law in any of the law firm’s sue-the-fans litigation, after the much hated legal outfit allowed private information about thousands of Sky’s internet customers (8000 at the last count) leak onto the web.

As previously reported, ACS:Law – which specialises in suing file-sharers on behalf of content owners, including a number of porn companies – was last week the victim of a so called ‘distributed denial of service attack’ by file-sharing supporters in the 4chan online community.

Somewhere along the line, a spreadsheet containing private information about thousands of alleged file-sharers who had been targeted by the law firm got published on the web. According to some tech blogs, it was actually IT people at the law firm who inadvertently published the spreadsheet while they tried to get ACS:Law’s website back online

The spreadsheet included the names and addresses of thousands of web users that have been targeted by ACS:Law, plus information on what content they were accused of illegally downloading, a lot of it pornographic. Details of conversations between the lawyers and the accused, plus in some cases the file-sharer’s credit card details, were also included.

When ACS sue an alleged file-sharer they need the accused’s internet service provider to reveal their name and address, because the agencies the lawyers use to monitor file-sharing can only identify the IP addresses of copyright infringers. ISPs will only hand over this information if a court order is obtained, though such orders are relatively easy to get these days. Clearly ACS has been getting an awful lot of them of late.

But, following the leaked spreadsheet debacle, BSkyB has now said that it will not hand over the details of any more customers to ACS – court order or no court order – until the company is assured no future breaches of data protection rules can occur.

A spokesman for the broadcaster and ISP said yesterday: “Following recent events, we have suspended all cooperation with ACS:Law with immediate effect. This suspension will remain in place until ACS:Law demonstrates adequate measures to protect the security of personal information. We continue to be very concerned at the apparent loss of data held by ACS:Law and by the actions of those who have sought to publicise the identities of individual customers”.

They continued: “Like other broadband providers, Sky can be required to disclose information about customers whose accounts are alleged to have been used for illegal downloading. We support the principle that copyright material should be protected and we cooperate with court orders requiring disclosure. Because the security of customer information is also a high priority, we only ever disclose such data in encrypted form. In addition, we have an agreement with ACS:Law that requires data to be stored and used safely and securely”.

TalkTalk, the most vocal of all the ISPs when it comes to the content industries’ efforts to combat file-sharing, has also issued a statement. It says it has never handed over the details of any of their customers to ACS:Law, so is not affected by this, but adds that the whole incident gives kudos to Talk Talk’s argument that those methods currently being pursued to combat file-sharing – so ACS style sue-the-fans litigation and BPI-backed three-strikes – are fundamentally flawed.

Says Mr TalkTalk: “[The ACS leak is] a stark reminder of the dangers of giving out customer details to third parties in trying to combat file-sharing. While we do not condone illegal file-sharing, we have consistently argued for better ways of combating copyright theft. Handing over customer details to law firms to seek ‘compensation’, based on accusations from rightsholders, is not the answer”.

The statement continued: “Tracking down illegal file-sharers is complex and the current approach isn’t working. The first problem is around detection: if you can only see what’s being downloaded at each connection, how do you know which of the several users has actually infringed copyright? Secondly, we’ve demonstrated before how it’s possible for connections to be hacked by serial file-sharers. Again, this can result in false accusations being made against subscribers and is the key reason why we’ve refused to hand over our customers’ details to ACS:Law or any other law firm working in this way”.



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