UK Internet providers have now banded together to challenge anti-P2P law firms who try to turn thousands of IP addresses into customer names—and a London court will hear their objections to the entire process.
The ISPs were burned last month when a massive e-mail leak from the top anti-P2P firm in the UK, ACS Law, exposed their own spreadsheets of customer names matched to the pornographic films they allegedly downloaded. The revelation of this embarrassing (and unproven) behavior was compounded by the fact that several of the ISPs were taking no security precautions, instead e-mailing their Excel spreadsheets unencrypted and without passwords.
PlusNet's Chief Operation Officer Richard Fletcher apologized last week to customers. "We are investigating how we came to be sending unencrypted data as we have robust systems for managing data," he said. But the blame, in his view, lies largely elsewhere: "We are extremely angry with ACS Law for allowing this to happen."
PlusNet, along with other ISPs like BSkyB, showed up in a London court yesterday to challenge the newest "Norwich Pharmacal Order" (NRO). NROs allow companies like ACS Law and rival firm Gallant Macmillan to take their lists of allegedly infringing IP addresses to ISPs and ask for a lookup; the orders function much like subpoenas in similar US cases.
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