The Patents County Court yesterday stayed the hearing of actions for alleged illegal file-sharing, brought by London firm ACS:Law on behalf of its clients MediaCAT.

His Honour Judge Birss refused to discontinue the cases in the manner requested by the claimants, saying the notices of discontinuance were an abuse of the court’s process and ‘avoid judicial scrutiny of the underlying claims’.

The 26 cases were the first to be taken to court, after ACS:Law sent letters to thousands of consumers accusing them of illegally downloading copyrighted material over the internet.

MediaCAT, a company that pursued alleged infringements on behalf of owners of copyrighted material, tried earlier this year through its lawyers to discontinue the proceedings, but the judge refused to allow the claims to be dropped because the copyright holders were not in court.

Had the judge discontinued the cases, the copyright holders themselves could still have pursued the defendants.

At that hearing Birss said: ‘I am getting the impression with every twist and turn since I started looking at these cases that there is a desire to avoid any judicial scrutiny.’

At yesterday’s hearing he said Media CAT and ACS:Law have a ‘very real interest in avoiding public scrutiny of the cause of action’ because, in parallel to the 26 court cases, a ‘wholesale letter-writing campaign’, based on the threat of legal action, was being conducted from which revenues were being generated.

Birss noted that ACS:Law received 65% of the revenue from the letter-writing exercise and said: ‘Whether it was intended to or not, I cannot imagine a system better designed to create disincentives to test the issues in court. Why take cases to court and test the assertions when one can just write more letters and collect payments from a proportion of the recipients?’

The case has been listed again later this month for the owners of the copyrighted material in question to attend if they wish to pursue the actions. Otherwise the lawyers for the defendants will apply for the cases to be struck out and for the issue of costs to be considered.

Michael Forrester, an intellectual property partner at national firm Ralli, which represents five of the defendants, said: ‘It was important for all the defendants in these matters that discontinuance was properly obtained so no collateral advantage could be obtained against them by anyone not a party to these proceeding’.

He said the case concerned consumers who had explained that they could not possibly have uploaded or downloaded copyrighted protected material, as alleged against them, but who were still pursued.

‘The legal basis for the claims made against these alleged file sharers involves complex legal and technical principles. These are extremely difficult for a lay person to understand and can mean an innocent person is being pursued,’ said Forrester.

Andrew Crossley, sole principal at ASC: Law closed down his firm on 3 February 2011, after withdrawing from the case in January, citing threats to his life over his involvement in the matter. He declined to comment.

An SRA spokesman said the closure would not affect its ongoing investigation into the firm’s conduct.

MediaCAT is also understood to have closed its doors.

It is understood that the lawyers representing ACS:Law’s insurers were in court, though that has not been confirmed by them.