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#What is behind the end of ACS: Law?

Andrew Crossley, the founder of ACS:Law, has blamed his decision to abandon his pirsuit of alleged unlawful filesharers on hackers and bomb threats, but what else could be behind it?

12:56PM GMT 25 Jan 2011

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ACS:Law was targeted by Anonymous last year, as part of a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults against entertainment industry websites. However, there is no evidence it was "hacked" - private emails were exposed during the attck, but apparently as a result of an inexpert effort by the firm to restore its website, not an outside infiltration of its server.

Nevertheless, the exposure of embarrassing personal details about Mr Crossley was a humiliation. Meanwhile the loss of sensitive data ACS:Law had collected on members of the public remains under investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office.

The DDoS attack followed an interview with The Register in which Mr Crossley taunted Anonymous, saying "I have far more concern over the fact of my train turning up 10 minutes late or having to queue for a coffee than them wasting my time with this sort of rubbish".

But there were other problems which may have conrtibuted to Mr Crossley's decision to abandon his pursuit of alleged unlawful filesharers.

ACS:Law was not the first law firm to try to turn the widespread infringement of copyright via filesharing networks into a money-maker. In fact, it acquired the business from Davenport Lyons, a much larger firm that found the bad publicity intolerable, less than two years ago.