Highly Sensitive P2P Email Leaked From Gilbert + Tobin’s Peter Leonard

A couple of weeks ago, the legal world sat back and revelled when UK firm ACS:Law – a dodgey outfit that essentially blackmailed people pirating porn off the internet via P2P networks into paying a £495 “settlement fee” – had its entire email history hacked and placed on the internet (the full story is here – essential reading for our followers).

Bill busts a move to free tunes

Well, in a similarly scandalous development, but one much closer to home, it appears that the law firm responsible for prosecuting the case against leaving the internet as a forum for sharing data (like movies and songs), is itself embroiled in its own P2P file-sharing scandal.

Gilbert + Tobin, you’ll recall, represented the interests of a group of film companies in the crucially important IP case of Roadshow Films v iiNet (No 3).  The decision was handed down in February this year and essentially absolved ISPs from any responsibility in ensuring that internet users dont share copyrighted material via P2P networks.

This was bad news for G+T. An anonymous G+T spy commented at the time:

After the decision, Neil Gane of Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) made a statement expressing his great disappointment with the judge’s decision. A video of Mr Gane’s statement is shown here:

Note the gentleman on the left of Mr Gane, Michael Williams, partner of G+T. Mr Williams is the tough copyright litigator who helped Universal Music to victory in the Cooper and Kazaa cases. However, like his clients, Mr Williams did not look very tough on Thursday. His eyes appear downcast and his ‘countenance … differs markedly in expression from his picture on the G+T website:
I guess G+T partners are human too?

We’re quite certain that the human side of G+T partners (and more particularly, the human frailty of anger) will be in full view this afternoon, following the revelation below.

We were sent the following email from an anonymous G+T spy yesterday:

From: Peter Leonard
Sent: Tuesday, 19 October 2010 10:41 AM
To: Everyone GTLAW
Subject: BitTorrent and other follies

We recently had an instance of a person downloading from BitTorrent on the G+T account. This is clearly contrary to G+T’s Communications Policy. Even more importantly, it is illegal and (therefore) just plain stupid. There should be non peer to peer download activity using G+T resources. Please be aware that we monitor such activity and I have asked Andrew Mitchell to report any instances to me. Even more scary, I’ll also tell Michael Williams…

regards

Peter L
________________________________________
Peter Leonard | Partner | Gilbert + Tobin | T +61 2 9263 4003 | F +61 2 9263 4111

We wonder what the individual was allegedly downloading? Perhaps like Mohammed from the West Midlands in the ACS:Law scandal, it was a couple of educational titles like “Ancient Secrets of the Karma Sutra” and “My Wife’s First Monster C***”.

Do you have any ideas?

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