United Kingdom: A law firm is under a government investigation after sending letters to hundreds of consumers which accused them of committing illegal file-sharing and unauthorized download from the Internet.

In a statement, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said that Davenport Lyons is being investigated for allegedly “bullying and harassing” people by sending letters claiming that they have been involved in illegal sharing of movies, games, music, and applications.

The law firm, which was hired by copyright holders, also demand a payment of £500 to those who received the letter.

In December 2008, consumer advocate Which? has filed a complaint against the law firm for allegedly “using a tactic that aims to harass and accuse people of copyright infringements even if they did not commit such violation.”

When asked for comments, the group said the investigation “is something that will favour consumers”, adding that this might serve as a warning to other law firms.

In an interview, Which? head of legal affairs Deborah Prince said that the organization wants the law firm to stop “bullying people just to make a quick buck.”

“These bullying tactics should be immediately stop to protect the interest of consumers”, Prince said, adding that the organization “is pleased with the SRA’s decision to investigate the issue.”

Prince also warned law firms from harassing people by randomly accusing them of copyright infringements.

According to previous reports, more than 150 consumers have complained to authorities after they have received a letter from the law firm accusing them of illegally sharing online files.

Meanwhile, Davenport Lyons has declined to give comments on the issue.

A new report released by UK-based research firm Consumer Focus on Monday showed that millions of iPod, MP3, and computer users are unaware of violations they are committing when they “format shift” compact disk contents into their music players.

According to the report, at least 17 percent of adult users were not aware of the violations they are committing every time they copy CD contents into their computers or music players.

“The so-called format shifting or changing of CD music contents into MP3, MP4, or other music formats is illegal under the British copyright law. When a person has upload the music files from the CDs to their computers, the shift in the content format can already be considered illegal, even if they listen to just one file,” said Consumer Focus International Director Jill Johnstone.

The government-backed organization’s survey was conducted to more than 2, 000 adult users.

Meanwhile, in a separate survey, research firm Ofcom said that more than 41 percent or rough 18 million adults in UK own MP3 digital music player or iPod devices. The study also showed that there are at least five million Brits who own mobile phones and other devices that can play music files downloaded from their PCs.

Consumer Focus said that since the law was approved by the legislative body, not a single person has been charged or prosecuted with regards to format shifting.

The company also said that the music industry has to seriously consider in pushing for the law to be changed if it want to address the growing problem of piracy not only in the Internet but also in the personal level.

Consumer Focus said that the legislation should be enacted together with the Digital Economy Bill, which is still subjected to debate in the parliament, for the government to be able to be true to its crackdown against illegal file-sharers.

“The credibility of the UK government in the fight against illegal file-sharers and other copyright infringers will fall underneath the floor if they will not be able to address this problem,” Johnstone said.

Major Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the United States has warned on Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission over the proposed Title II Internet Access Classification, saying that “it would be a profound mistake that would only give more harm and long-lasting negative consequences to consumers and economy.”

In a letter to FCC Chairperson Julius Genchowski, ISPs said that the move to classify Internet access as Title II service (making Internet service subject to common carrier regulations) would hurt the consumers more than it would do them good.

Comcast was not included in the letter.

It will be recalled that the FCC announced that it will put ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act to establish a clearer and more organized control in upholding the Internet neutrality of all the providers.

Putting the ISPs under telecommunications regulations would help the agency to control the content being offered by the companies rather than putting it under the lighter terms of information services, which was earlier being implemented by the commission.

But the ISPs strongly opposed the new proposal, saying there is already an on-going consensus on how to achieve the best possible terms in achieving the open Internet policy of President Barack Obama.

“The on-going efforts are really productive and there is no need in putting ISP companies under Title II,” a spokesperson of the organizations said.

Among those who have signed the letter were Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, National Cable & Telecommunications Association and other major wireless and phone firms in the US.

The companies warned the FCC that the move to put them under Title II of the Communications Act would “plunge” the industry into dark ages, adding that it would add “years of litigation and regulatory chaos”.

The companies also cited that the new regulations would hamper the government’s goal to achieve the 100 Mbps broadband speed to more than 100 million households in the US by 2020.

A new study conducted by the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, Canada showed that doctors are unwittingly sharing information about their patients while they use peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing websites.

The study also showed that computers in hospitals and homes are easily vulnerable to P2P file-sharing attacks, citing various software needed to be installed to the machine. This software is designed to gather all information stored in the computers then automatically share them in file-sharing websites.

“Our study suggests that doctors are actually swapping private information about their patients without their knowledge. Some of the software installed in their homes and offices can make health and financial records of the patients vulnerable to cyberattacks and other fraudulent activities in this file-sharing website,” the study stated.

The study, which was published last Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, said that health-care professionals who are frequent users of P2P file-sharing websites are most commonly and inadvertently releasing official patient records in their computers as they download music files.

“I think that the public, particularly doctors and other health-care professionals should be aware of the situation. They are unwittingly leaking out significant amount of information about the people they are taking care of into P2P networks,” said Khaled El Emam, the lead researcher in the study and professor of electronic health information at the University of Ottawa.

El Emam cited that one of the search software, which is programmed to collect all shareable documents in the computer, can open up important files then send it out to the online public.

“The wizard program is intended to look for media files such as music, videos, and other documents, could potentially be sharing large amount of vital information to the public without you being aware,” El Emam warned the doctors.

The study took almost a year to be completed and aims to analyze all the IP addressed of hundreds of million of computers in the United States and Canada, which are connected to file-sharing websites.

It also showed that at least two percent of computers in the region contained vital health information that is vulnerable to fraud and other criminal activities.

A new report released by Internet company Cisco Systems Inc on Thursday showed that online streaming of popular television series and movies have already overtaken file-sharing in terms of the number of users.

Despite strong showing of file-sharing websites in Sweden, Cisco, in a statement, said that online video streaming is actually much more popular to online users.

The company said that the case hurled against The Pirate Bay has played a huge role to the drop in the number of people using peer-to-peer file-sharing websites because of fears that they might also held liable to the “illegal” activities.

Earlier, a Swedish court has convicted the founders of the P2P file-sharing website.

Also, Cisco said that the broadband Internet connection is becoming faster and more reliable making users tune in more to live or recorded video streaming more often. The faster broadband speed also eliminates the need for users to download copyrighted materials such as movies and music and reduce the risk of them being prosecuted.

“Even though the actual number of people doing file-sharing activities continued to increase, we have calculated that it will become less important in the coming months,” Cisco Sweden technical manager Henrick Bergqvist said.

Sweden’s most popular file-sharing advocate, also the founders of The Pirate Bay, will be launching the new online streaming service called Video Bay in the coming months.

The people behind the said program said that they were inspired by the growing success of music streaming service Spotify and video streaming website Voddler.

Based on the Swedish Law, video and music streaming is not illegal but it is, however, unlawful to upload.

Meanwhile, Cisco expects file-sharing on the Internet to continue growing in the coming years as more countries are not yet that well-protected by the online laws. The firm also eyes an 80 percent yearly increase for the platform.

But Cisco insisted that online streaming will be more popular in the coming years with a predicted 130 percent yearly growth rate.

The Joint Select Committee on Human Rights on Monday cried foul over the British government’s approach to the Piracy or Digital Economy Bill, saying that it could breach rights of millions of Internet users.

In a statement, the committee, which is composed of influential ministers of parliament, said that the government’s Digital Economy Bill needed more clarification, saying that technical measures were not clearly specified in the legislation.

The group also said that the new bill could possible create unwanted over-board powers, which includes the three-strike policy imposed against a persistent illegal downloader.

“We know that the problem on the Internet is constantly creating new sets of challenges to our policy makers. But these problems can’t justify an legislation that is ill-defined or sweep legislative responses, especially those with a threat to the freedom of expression and privacy of the users,” MP and committee chairperson Andrew Dismore said.

But a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which oversees the Digital Economy Bill, was quick to say that the British government has always been clear about the new bill, saying that it would help the authorities address the growing problem of illegal file-sharing over peer-to-peer networks.

Meanwhile, Dismore said that their concern over the bull is the lack of details, saying that their examination on parts of the said legislation focused on the plans of the government to tackle illegal file-sharing.

“It’s been difficult, even in the narrow area we have focused on, to get a clear picture of the scope and impact of the provisions,” he said.

Under the new Digital Economy Bill, government regulator Ofcom will be given new powers that would enable them to disconnect users from the Internet if they were identified as a persistent illegal file-sharer.

“They have not specified in the provisions whether the entire household or just the family member would be cut off,” Dismore pointed out.

Nintendo Co. Ltd. announced on Tuesday that the Australian man accused of illegally uploading the new Super Mario Bros. game has agreed to pay $1.3 million under a settlement deal facilitated by the US Federal Court.

It will be recalled that 24-year-old James Burt illegally uploaded the new Super Mario game for the Wii console to the Internet six days before its official global release.

In a statement, Nintendo spokesman said that the legal proceeding at the US Federal Court has led to the settlement with Burt, saying that the accused agreed to pay at least $1.5 million by way of damages due to massive losses in sales brought by his action.

According to reports, Burt was able to upload the new Super Mario game when a local shop accidentally put the game on display six days prior to its release.

After discovering that the game was already made available online, the company has put into action their computer experts to trace the origin of the upload.

The company said that Burt has breached anti-piracy and copyright laws by hacking into the game and illegally sharing it on the Internet through peer-to-peer networks.

Usually, the company will only release games in Australia six months after it was released in major gaming markets like Japan and United States. It was the first time that Australians were ahead of the release.

“The case was not isolated in Australia. It was actually a global issue now. To date, many of the Wii users were able to download the new Super Mario Bros. game causing major losses to the company and the industry as well,” Nintendo Australia Managing Director Rose Lappin said in an interview.

“Once upload on the Internet, it becomes anyone’s really,” Lappin added.

Aside from the settlement amount, Burt was ordered by the court to pay $100, 000 legal fee of Nintendo.

Internet Service Providers (ISP) in Australia stayed with its decision to cap the amount of bandwidth free consumers can use, saying that the broadband download quotas will stay.

The decision came after calls from Australian consumers for the ISPs to remove the capping of the download bandwidth, which has been implemented several years ago. To date, Australia is the only place in the world where Internet consumers were slugged with download limits on their online access plans.

However, everything may change in the coming months after New Zealand’s Telecom and  its local arm AAPT announced that it will start offering unlimited broadband plans to Australian consumers. The company has challenged the status quo being implemented by the ISP companies, saying that they should follow suit if they want to stay in business.

With the introduction of the new broadband plan, Internet users can now run full-speed connection 24 hours a day. User will just need to sign up for the two-year deal.

Earlier, AAPT Chief Paul Broad challenged all of the ISPs in Australia to end the practice of imposing quotas to all users, saying that they should match what their company has to offer.

“Imposing quotas on the amount of download speed and bandwidth to consumers is seen as a joke in other country. If we compare our service with those of the United States, there is no such thing as a cap on the bandwidth,” he added.

The unlimited broadband connection of the AAPT will cost $99.95/month and users will be connected via an ADSL2+broadband. It also comes with a voice service and music downloading package.

Meanwhile, iiNet said that they have no immediate plans to match the AAPT offer, saying that they would “watch with interest”.

The company also said that they do not need to offer their consumers with unlimited broadband connection since most of the consumers in their area do not even meet or exceed the monthly download caps.

Online micro-blogging website Twitter.com on Tuesday urged its users to immediately reset their account passwords following massive phishing attacks, which has stolen thousands of usernames and passwords through fake BitTorrent sites.

The announcement came after Twitter technicians discovered plans of massive phishing activity to millions of user accounts in their website. The technicians noticed a sudden surge in the number of followers to a couple of accounts in the last five days that they have monitored the activity.

Del Harvey, the director for Twitter’s trust and safety division, said that they have not seen an attack like the ones they have discovered, saying that Torrent-based attacks are somewhat surprising to them.

“These Torrent sites are not exactly new to us. But this is the first time that we’ve seen an attack originating from this type of vector. We believe that in the past years, someone has been creating torrent websites that will require login passwords and has created forums that is specifically setup for the torrent usage,” Harvey said.

“We also believe that these people will then sell the collected login passwords to other people who are looking for well-crafted download site of their own,” he added.

Harvey then pointed to the masterplan behind the said websites, saying that the “patient” cybercriminal has waited for a long time for the forums to get more popular and then used the exploited login details of those who have signed up.

“Most of the users were reportedly redirected to websites requesting their passwords and other log-in information. The login passwords and usernames will then be used to third-party websites like Twitter,” he said.

Harvey said that they will inform their users about the recent attacks, adding that they will soon come up with the complete list of forums that has been identified as an attack source.

Australian human-rights groups on Tuesday expressed fear over the possible takeover of Internet Service Providers (ISP) with regard to the web content access and control in the country, citing the highly anticipated verdict of the Federal Court over Internet piracy on Thursday.

The Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), a group established to protect the civil rights of millions of online users in the country, fear that the Federal anti-piracy court could turn ISP firms to “online copyrights police” and cut the Internet access of users accused of illegally downloading or sharing files over peer-to-peer networks.

“There will be a paradigm shift. We will have to be used in seeing the rest of our lives offline,” EFA Spokesperson Geordie Guy said.

The verdict on the piracy case, which has pitted Australia’s largest Internet provider iiNet against Hollywood and Ausie film and television producers, is expected to come out on Thursday.

It will be recalled that entertainment companies, including Hollywood giants Paramount Pictures, Village Roadshow, and Twentieth Century Fox International have accused iiNet of allowing or have not done enough to prevent thousands of online users from sharing music and movie files illegally on the Internet.

However, iiNet stressed that it has never authorized or encourage, in any way, online users from illegally sharing or downloading files online. In fact, the company has even warned users from using P2P networks and sharing copyright infringed files.

Meanwhile, EFA said that there is a big possibility that the Australian Internet piracy case could go further that similar cases filed around the world, saying that ISP companies are usually held responsible for the illegal activities done by consumers.

“For example, we’ve have never seen an electric company being held responsible for supplying electricity to homes that were found growing or making illicit drugs,” he said.

Based on court records, at least 94, 000 alleged violations were committed in iiNet’s network in just 59 weeks.