ACS: Law have been making a name for themselves for the past year for sending out very strongly worded letters to people who had been accused of copyright infringement. This might sound perfectly good, except it doesn’t have a shred of evidence that any of the people it sends letters to have actually committed a crime, can’t back up any of it’s very heavy legal demands when asked and has overall been trying it’s hardest to scam as many people out of large sums of money as possible.

Now another UK law firm, Ralli, is trying to launch a group action for harassment against ACS: Law, who were referred to a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal earlier this week. The letters demanded payments that at times totalled up to £750 and threatened court action if people did not pay up.

Ralli has been following ACS: Law for some time and have played a vital part in educating consumers and broadband owners about what to do if they receive such a letter. Now they hope to take that one step further and are calling for anyone who has been affected by one of these letters to come forward.

A member of the law team at Ralli, Michael Forrester, stated:

“We are advising people who have received these letters but have never even heard of the media they are supposed to have obtained. For example, a middle aged gentleman who has been accused of obtaining dance music when he has no idea what the genre is, let alone the artist!

It can be incredibly upsetting for people to receive such letters and they may well have a claim for harassment against ACS Law so I am urging them to come forward.”

It’s great news, but for something like these to succeed Ralli will have to get a much larger band of people behind them than they currently has. The firm has stated that similar legal action is being taken against ACS: Law in the United States.

The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) has released a report this week entitled “Global Player or Subsidy Junkie? Decision time for the BBC.” Amongst other things, the report calls for the BBC to begin to run on a subscription service and to entirely abolish the licence fee – some pretty big ideas for the BBC right now, who have come under more and more pressure in recent years to reinvent the way they make money. One of the main reasons the report gives the abolishment of the license is the prevalence of online broadband, suggesting that licences to broadcast have become obsolete in the digital world. It’s hard to disagree with that.

Here are a few more of the reasons that the ASI believe the BBC should end the era of the licence fee:

• It criminalises poor people.
• It forces people to pay for genuinely “free” services funded by advertising.
• It obliges the BBC to replicate a crude commercial model based on mass-audience advertising.
• Universal broadband and the Internet make a “licence” to broadcast obsolete. On the other hand, they enable direct delivery of services outside the UK. The current funding model denies access to Britons and others resident overseas.

But can we really expect the internet as we know it in the UK to be able to seriously replace the BBC? Currently, it doesn’t seem very likely. The UK broadband network doesn’t even reach all homes in the country yet, and when it does it’s likely many more places will still be without the sort of broadband speeds or bandwidth that are needed to properly stream television online: even in standard quality. Then there are HD broadcasts to think about, so it might be a long time before we can really say the BBC licence fee is obsolete, at least on the internet side of things. We don’t even have universal broadband yet, and the thinnest of commitments from the government says we won’t have it for another 5 years, yet.