As per the sister petition to this one: Waive the Statute of Limitations on historic Intellectual Property rape.

If someone were to reach into your pocket and steal your money, they have committed a 'Criminal' act of theft. Yet if they reach into your mind and steal your ideas and concepts, in the context of copying or using your Intellectual Property (IP) without your knowledge or consent, then they have committed a 'Civil' act of theft. The amounts stolen are incomparable, in that you may have a few £'s in your pocket, but your IP could be worth £Billions!

In the UK you can get Legal Aid to help you to take Criminal Action, but this in NOT available for Civil Actions, leaving you to finance action for this type of offence yourself.

This of course can take years if the IP Theft itself didn't come to light immediately, and/or it left you broke and without an income stream. As you not only need to recover from the theft, create an alternative income stream, and then start collating the evidence, all before you file your case.

This is where you are then potentially blocked by a 'Lack of Funds'! Which could render you unable to take action.

The goal of this petition is to have the laws changed so that in special circumstances, such as where the victim is left financially unable to file a case against the perpetrators within the time limit, and/or where the offence itself may not even come to the surface for several years, and/or the evidence takes much longer to find, corroborate, confirm and collate, the victim can gain access to 'Legal Aid' so they can pursue the case much sooner.

Here are a couple of examples of this situation:

Survivor TV Gameshow 1997
Dragons Den 2005/Shark Tank 2009/Money Tigers 2001

Both of these TV Shows are plagiarised from my earlier proposals pitched between 1996 (Survivor) and 1999 (Dragons Den).

I created these Treatments whilst unemployed, and spent several years trying to raise the funds to bring them to life, even reaching out to others for help, only for them to reject my proposals and produce them behind my back whilst I continued my search elsewhere for support.

Each theft came one after another, with these and two more projects, keeping me in a perpetual state of financial distress and unable to pursue action.

No Inventor/Creator should ever be denied access to legal support due to lack of funds, especially when their rightful incomes are being stolen by others masquerading in their place, be they 'Civil' or 'Criminal' offences.

Please sign this petition, to allow people like myself to finally get the justice we deserve.

I have also created an Anonymous donation page, which will build a new global Innovation Support Fund called 'BizKit-Tin', so that Inventors and Creators like myself will not have to expose our IP to others because we do not qualify for conventional funding sources.