[Infowarrior] - Anti-Piracy Lawyers Vandalize Wikipedia Page

[Richard Forno]

Anti-Piracy Lawyers Vandalize Wikipedia Page
Written by enigmax on April 02, 2010
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-vandalize-wikipedia-page-100402/

As mass file-sharing litigation lawsuits go inter-continental, not  
everyone is proud to be associated with this type of work. Lawyers  
Tilly Bailey & Irvine in the UK have been hard at work this month,  
editing large chunks of their own Wikipedia page in an attempt to hide  
their involvement and also earning themselves a copyright infringement  
warning.

This week, Jeffrey Weaver, a lawyer for U.S. Copyright Group, proudly  
announced that the company would be bringing the mass-litigation model  
against alleged BitTorrent users to the United States.

“We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an  
alternative distribution channel,” he unashamedly confirmed.

This business model has been running ahead at full-steam in Germany  
and the UK for some time now. As they do most of the work and are seen  
to do most of the perceived bullying of individuals ill-equipped to  
defend themselves, the lawyers operating these schemes have been  
singled out for most of the criticism.

Tilly Bailey & Irvine (TBI), the lawyers who have just made their  
first steps into this business model in the UK, had a very stormy  
entrance. Within weeks their activities had been noted negatively by  
the Government and had their traditional 170 year-old company publicly  
connected with their porn-industry customers.

Of course, the antics of TBI haven’t gone unnoticed by the tech-savvy,  
who have been adding details of their involvement in these schemes to  
the company’s Wikipedia page, as detailed below:

Volume litigation

On 1 March 2010, Lord Clement-Jones criticised TBI Solicitors along  
with firm ACS:Law for tactics that they employed when accusing people  
of copyright infringement.[11] He called TBI Solicitors “new entrants  
to the hall of infamy”[11] and their activities “an embarrassment to  
the rest of the creative rights industry”.[11]

On 3 March, UK consumer rights website Which? reported complaints by  
people who had received letters from TBI Solicitors accusing them of  
illegally sharing files of pornographic material that belongs to  
Golden Eye (International).[12] TBI Solicitors threatened legal action  
against the letters’ recipients unless they paid ?700 compensation  
within fourteen days of the date of the letter.[12] On 9 March, Which?  
reported an undertaking by Lord Young that the government would keep  
watch on ACS:Law and TBI Solicitors.[13]

In an attempt to remove this embarrassing information, a staff member  
at Tilly Bailey & Irvine took direct action – by deleting the entire  
section ten days after TorrentFreak broke the news of their entrance  
to this business.

So, how do we know it was TBI doing the editing? Because they were  
smart enough to edit it from 195.153.132.204, the IP address  
registered to their company.

“Please do not remove sourced content from Wikipedia, as you did with  
TBI Solicitors — this is vandalism,” wrote a Wikipedia admin to Tilly  
Bailey & Irvine.

“Furthermore, your IP address geolocates to ‘TILLY BAILEY & IRVINE’  
which suggests that you have a conflict of interest in removing  
criticism of the firm from Wikipedia. I suggest that you familiarise  
yourself with that policy before editing this particular article any  
further,” added the award-winning user, Rlandmann.

The final embarrassment on the TBI ‘talk’ page prompted another  
comment by Rlandmann.

Copyright problem

I’ve also removed a large chunk of text from the TBI Solicitors  
article that was copied-and-pasted from the thisishartlepool website.  
This creates a potential copyright problem for Wikipedia.

TorrentFreak has learned that Tilly Bailey & Irvine has already  
dropped some cases against alleged infringers after they denied their  
accusations. We’re not sure if the editing of their Wikipedia page  
means that they intend to move out of this business altogether, since  
thus far they have refused to answer any of our questions, but it  
would be a welcome move.