Lawyers Fighting Pirates Have Become Pirates Too

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Apparently, so do anti-piracy lawyers. Writing all those letters is hard work. Ars details a series of exchanges between two anti-piracy lawyers, wherein, one gladly helps out the other, only to find out that said company has barrowed quite heavily from their letters, paragraphs and responses.

It gets interesting when the offended starts shaming the other firm for their practices and warns of reporting them for blatant plagiarism and disregard of the very principles and, arrr, pirates that they’re fighting against. One firm that specializes in copyright prosecutions, accusing another of pirating their own letters that are designed to inform users that they’re engaging in infringements.

Classic. Looks like this is one warning letter that the other firm doesn’t have a response to copy from. To be clear, music pirates being notified of piracy by anti-piracy lawyers that pirated the letter’s content from another leading anti-piracy firm. This is what happens when massive e-mail leaks occur at your firms. One can only imagine the other shenanigans that occur, like one telling the other that they are going to BitTorrent The Social Network or Jay-Z’s latest album. Then, there’d be all kinds questions raised. A look at the e-mails:

"My cooperation does not extend to allowing, without my prior knowledge, licence or permission, to use my firm's range of precedent letters, paragraphs and responses. These have been developed over a long period of time and are not available for use by others… I have worked tirelessly and at great personal financial cost over the past year to perfect my firm's business model and it would appear that you have chosen a lazy short cut to ape my business model…" (Read on.)