Onion News

We recently discussed UK law firm, Davenport Lyons, which had been criticized widely for running a controversial campaign supposedly to stamp out copyright infringement, but seemed a lot more like extortion to many. Basically it would contract with software companies to enforce their copyright... and would then send out a ton of demand letters (based on questionable evidence) requiring cash payments to avoid being sued. Not surprisingly, many people just paid up rather than risk getting sued -- even if they were innocent. Of course, all the controversy and negative publicity seemed to get back to the company. High profile clients like Atari dropped them. Last month, some noticed a nearly identical campaign, but this time coming from a different company called ACS Law. The only problem? A little investigating suggested that the two firms were clearly related -- with ACS using documents created by Davenport Lyons.

Things continue to get more ridiculous, as TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said.

It really is quite amusing how often those who insist they're big supporters of intellectual property and not "stealing" the works of others always seem to get caught red-handed in plagiarism and copying others' work. In the meantime, how often do we see supporters of more reasonable copyright (or no copyright) get caught doing this? Hmm?

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