Remember Davenport Lyons? Their clients who discovered that it was actually ruinous to get a reputation with paying customers as RIAA-like thugs certainly do. They’ve been all but silent of late.

However, a new UK law firm, ACS Law, appears to be doing the same things: sending out legal threat letters demanding between £400 and £700, but disappearing with no further response when questioned more closely. TorrentFreak details the unearthly similarities and gives a nice list of questions you can send if they ever contact you.

The content industry is addicted to control. We tell them over and over again that DRM is mathematically impossible. There is no such thing as a trusted client: you can’t give the customer the lock and the key to the lock and simultaneously keep it secret from them. There is no DRM that hasn’t been broken or bypassed unless it has so few customers that no-one cared to.

And the customers despise it: Macrovision, DVD regions, non-CDs, iTunes, HDMI, hifi systems that won’t let you use the digital SACD or DVD-A output. They got screwed over by Liquid Audio, then Microsoft PlaysForSure, then Yahoo Music shutting down. And Apple is getting distinctly weird lately.

But the industry lust for control is so overwhelming that, burnt and burnt again, they’ll keep trying. Offer stupid amounts of money for a physical impossibility and someone will claim to be able to do it for you. Ladeez gemmun, I give you the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. Formerly known as Open Content, this one will work for sure. (Even if the press embargo failed.) This time. No unpaid copies or downloads ever again. You betcha.

(No Nokia, Samsung or LG in this everyone-but-Apple list. No movies on mobiles? Epic fail.)

The ridiculously widely publicised default judgement against a filesharer has attracted the sort of attention they’d probably rather it hadn’t. Michael Coyle of Lawdit Solicitors has offered to defend fileshares targeted by Davenport Lyons pro bono.

Of course, it’ll probably help if you’re not a dickhead.

(KaZaA is so 2001, darling.)

Davenport Lyons, “a leading London law firm,” has put out a press release, which has been run as-is by large chunks of the press, speaking of the Patents County Court in London having ruled that the unnamed woman “should pay Topware Interactive, owner of the computer game Dream Pinball 3D, damages of £6,086.56 plus costs and disbursements of £10,000.”

The only problem is that no trace of the case’s existence can be found. Several posters to the Open Rights Group mailing list have failed to find any mention of such a case in court lists. Neil Dunbar of the list notes that the Patents County Court Diary will publish all cases as of October 2007. The Patent Courts Diary (PDF) “has no listing for this trial, although it does reference other trials for 22 July, when DL claim the judgment was handed down.”

A mysterious missing judgement, and a press release reprinted without the faintest nod to fact-checking? It’s August.

Update: Actual journalism found in the Daily Mail! (Warning: Daily Mail.) It appears to be a default judgement against an unemployed single mother, Isabella Barwinska, who didn’t show up to court (despite BBC report to the contrary). Lotsa luck collecting.

Sorry, EMI — fair use is possible in sound recordings. Even for duplicitous creationist nutters no sane person would want to be associated with. This may have just blown the bottom out of sample licensing.

It’s scientifically proven: keeping everything in copyright forever leads to a tragedy of the anticommons. (Despite Cliff Richard’s pleas on behalf of continuing royalties for session musicians … er, hold on.)

If you keep doing obnoxious things to lots and lots of people, they may start talking. And then you discover some of them are high-powered lawyers who maintain high-quality documentation of your obnoxiousness … and then write journal articles for judges to learn all about you. Whoops.

ACTA is the “everything and a pony” Christmas wish list of the media companies. Everything down to the Internet becomes illegal. Such treaties rely on people not getting wind of them … because when the implications hit the media, people shit Get off your arse and write to your MP.

The BPI’s latest wheeze is a deal with six large British ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and Sky) to send “hundreds of thousands” of warning letters to customers they think are stealing music. These are the same letters Virgin Media has been sending out already. (Not that Virgin Media can actually make their customers hate them any more than they do.)

This move is a stalking horse to a compulsory ISP music license, as first pushed by Feargal Sharkey and now by Billy Bragg. At which point no-one ever buys a CD or individual download in the UK ever again, as they will in fact have paid their fee. And the UK music industry never grows again. If only I could believe their suicide would work out so immaculately.

Update: The British government has a secret target to cut 80% of illegal filesharing by 2011, assuming they’re in power that long. One wonders by what process that goal was set.

“In short, I turned a 86 year old Marlboro-smoking, Chrysler Sebring Convertable-driving, Pinochle-playing, Maroon-Five listening Great Grandmother into a music pirate. An enthusiastic one at that.”

After all, is there anything BitTorrent can’t do? Listen to your elders: Piracy, the better choice™.

Specifically, not just going after companies, but trying to personally bankrupt their CEOs — specifically Michael Robertson of MP3Tunes, an MP3 locker service that doesn’t even allow sharing. You might think a little corporate veil piercing would be most useful, but applied to try to intimidate people from even thinking up new things that a major label may not like, a little less so. So much for the New EMI.

Troy Agusto goes to second-hand shops, buys rare promos and sells them on eBay. Universal decided this was a copyright violation. Judge says: Wrong! The “promotional use only, not for sale” label is at best an internal record company directive — if they give you a promo absent a contract to return it, it’s yours. “Copyright holders can’t strip consumers of their first sale rights just by sticking a ‘Not for Sale’ label on a CD.”