So it seems that lawyers aren’t the only ones using copyright to extort money. Now, scammers have figured out a telling and disturbing fact: that when faced with the law, most people cower and willingly surrender money to avoid what they believe are far worse consequences.

Scammers have been sending out letters to people claiming to represent trade organizations such as the RIAA and the MPAA and demanding a settlement to avoid a lawsuit. Most people remember the multi-million dollar outlier cases of copyright infringement, such as with Tenenbaum and Thomas-Rasset. And most people – whether they’ve pirated content or not – know so little about copyright law as to submit without question whatever sum is demanded. They assume their own guilt.

This reveals two important things. First, it echoes what I have long noted and what has been shown time and again: that we are all copyright criminals when the letter of the law is applied. Hence why so many were willing to fork over hard-earned cash ($283,000 worth) to completely unknown, unseen, unverified entities just to avoid any assumed entanglement with the law.

At this point, the law is simply not working for people. It’s not working for content creators. It’s not even working for rightsholders, really. It’s only working for lawyers and other people willing to leverage the cryptic web that copyright law has become. Here lawyers are clearly conflated with scammers, and while they are certainly not the same, they perform the same action when the “crime” in question is systemic.

That means that when someone can safely assume that a high enough percentage of citizens will do nothing to fight an indictment, but simply assume that they have done something to warrant paying a hefty (albeit affordable) fine, then there’s something wrong with the law. At that point, breaking the law is so systemic that it simply is society and culture. Copyright infringement is so woven into so many citizen’s lives that any attempt to extract it via more laws, more enforcement, more litigation will only frustrate and confuse people while feeding a few law firms and trade organizations.

Oh, and attract con artists. Can’t forget that one.

Techdirt asks the other important question here: what can we expect people informed of this scam to do with real pay-up-or-else letters? God knows I’ve received letters in the mail telling me that I owed $50 to some company or bank I’ve never heard of, and that – after fees and interests – the debt is now thousands of dollars. That this collection company is willing to settle for just a few hundred dollars. This is clearly a scam, but such scams meet loads of success when we are a nation in debt to our gills. It seems logical. It seems believable. I’m sure I did forgot to pay somebody along the way. I’d better pay up or they’ll take my house or car or kids.

This is precisely how over-litigation and preemptive extortion for copyright infringement is now operating. We’ve all copied a CD for a friend. Watched a show on some shady streaming site, uploaded photos without permission, or maybe even downloaded a few tunes or a movie. That it’s assumed that we’ve all committed copyright infringement becomes self-evident when such scams work. And it’s not the dyed-in-the-wool pirate affected here. They know better than to simply kowtow to an empty threat written in ambiguous legalese. No, it’s the average citizen, with little knowledge of piracy or copyright law. The same type of person who would fall for a debt-collection scam instead of someone who’s actually skipped out on debt.

The fact is, when our methods of “law enforcement” bear no logistical difference from a scam, what is the difference?