UK's Solicitors Regulation Authority is cracking down on lawyers from the law firm Davenport Lyon. The law firm is famous for being one of the first law firms to practice what is now the common copyright settlement style lawsuits, in which the goal is to extract settlement fees by threatening to sue downloaders for downloading pirated content. Davenport Lyon has since stopped pursuing these types of cases, but other firms such as ACS:Law and the US Copyright Group have picked up where they left off.
The two lawyers from Davenport Lyon are now under investigation for pursuing individuals for settlements despite knowing full well that the evidence they had against these individuals, usually the IP address, were not conclusive enough to hold up in a court of law. IP addresses can be dynamically assigned to computers and it only identifies the connection that made the download attempt, not the actual person that did it - a connection that was hacked could be used to download illegal content without the owner of the connection being even aware of it.
The two lawyers will now face a disciplinary panel in May of next year to face these accusations.
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The two lawyers from Davenport Lyon are now under investigation for pursuing individuals for settlements despite knowing full well that the evidence they had against these individuals, usually the IP address, were not conclusive enough to hold up in a court of law. IP addresses can be dynamically assigned to computers and it only identifies the connection that made the download attempt, not the actual person that did it - a connection that was hacked could be used to download illegal content without the owner of the connection being even aware of it.
The two lawyers will now face a disciplinary panel in May of next year to face these accusations.
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