The ISPA has at last announced who were the finalists of its Internet Hero and Villain award 2011.
While the good guys are of course very interesting, let’s face it, it is far more stimulating to talk about the bad guys.
And the Internet villains are as follows:
• ACS Law/Andrew Crossley,
• Commissioner Barnier,
• New Zealand Government Commerce Minister Simon Power,
• Tayfun Acarer, the chairman of the Turkish Information and Communications Technologies Authority.
All of the above have not been the most pleasant people in the industry – for instance Tayfun thought it was a great to apply mandatory filtering on all internet connections in his country, Simon said three times caught downloading “illegally” – wave good bye to your connection, and the Commissioner failed to make the IPR strategy clear.
However, our Villain vote undeniably goes to ACS:Law’s very own Andrew Crossly, simply because we have been writing about his business/solicitors firm throughout the past couple of months.
In a nutshell, ACS:Law has been sending out threatening letters to alleged “illegal” downloaders and demanding they pay substantial amounts in damages for their unthinkable activities.
Since then, Crossley has had to pay fines of £20,000 for breaching data, but the charge was minimised to £1,000 as he said he was in a poor financial situation, now that his business has gone bust.
Yet he was spotted recently living in a roughly £700k worth mansion and driving a £200k Bentley Arnage.
Not that we are counting his money, but he just somehow fails to earn our sympathy.