What’s an Anton Piller order? wondered almost everyone encountering it in connection with the raid on Marconi Instruments Ltd by the Business Software Alliance (CI No 1,575) and vaguely aware that Anton Piller KG was a German heavy machinery manufacturer that inter alia builds mainframe power supplies: the Daily Telegraph has helpfully come up with the answer, saying that it is an instrument of English Common Law that in civil cases enables a plaintiff to get a court order that allows him and his solicitor to turn up unexpectedly at the premises of a suspect and sieze papers or other items of evidence of civil tort that might otherwise be destroyed; it was first used in 1975 in the case of Anton Piller against its UK representative Manufacturing Processes Ltd, which Piller suspected of marketing copyrighted engineering drawings; as a search warrant without warning, it is regarded even by many lawyers as too Dracononian; victims are described as having been Pillered – and that is just how they feel.
