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UK Police Launch Campaign To Shut Down Torrent Sites
An anonymous reader writes "City of London Police inform TorrentFreak that they have begun targeting sites that provide access to unauthorized content for 'criminal gain.' The initiative is part of a collaboration with Hollywood studios represented by FACT and the major recording labels of the BPI. In letters being sent out now, police accuse site operators of committing offenses under the Serious Crime Act. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau further warns that the crimes carry a jail sentence of 10 years."
The 'City of London' police, is actually a special private police force responsible for the 'City' part of London which is the small financial district. It works for the City of London corporation, the private company that controls that part of London (for historical reasons a private company controls that part of London). It can be hired, quite literally you pay them money and they'll enforce the 'law':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Police
http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/crime-and-community-safety/police/Pages/default.aspx
They don't have jurisdiction over Greater London, let alone the UK. They also don't have an elected police and crime commissioner. They don't have special competence in this area.
'National Fraud Intelligence Bureau' has a nice threatening sounding name, but is a private company created by the City of London police. There are a lot of these, they use them to avoid Freedom of Information act requests. Their official duty is to detect fraud in the city of London financial Financial district.
Their price list:
http://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/CityPolice/About/services/feesandcharges.htm
"Further, we have grounds to suspect that as owners and/or operators of the XXXXX website, you are committing offenses under the Serious Crime Act 2007 by doing acts capable of encouraging and assisting communication to the public (under s.107(2A) of the CDPA); "
These are almost certainly torrent *LINK* sites, which don't infringe copyright themselves. Anton Vickerman was not convicted of "facilitating copyright infringement", that was a fiction that FACT spread around. The police should not be presenting false information like this.
What he was charged with, was "conspiracy to defraud", not copyright infringement.
http://www.lojo.co.nz/downloads/0686010001361150697.pdf
http://blogscript.blogspot.com/2012/02/strange-case-of-soca-and-conspiracy-to.html
Which is presumably why the 'National Fraud Intelligence Bureau" is doing the PR work. They claimed he defrauded [who?] in order to make money. Sadly the judge was so keen to prosecute Vickerman, that he let them change the definition of 'fraud'. And now potentially any business which knows it can be used to infringe copyright is open to a fraud charge.
If you are in the UK, you might wish to avoid public comment, or at least comment anonymously. Discussions are logged now, and the UK police don't take kindly to contradictory viewpoints.
It's the City of London police which is something most Londoners never come across. It is a small police force with jurisdiction over the tiny historic core of the metropolis of London. This historic core is now the home of the British business, capital and the financial industry. It houses very few residents (i.e. people living there) but lots of employees. It is not surprising that this force particularly identifies with matters of interest to large companies.
Copyright infringement is only criminal if done on a commercial scale. In other words you have to be making a significant profit from it.
That's how the BPI tricked the police into raiding the owner of Oink's Pink Palace. They claimed he was charging for access and raking in the cash, but it was shown in court that he only accepted donations to cover the cost of running the site. The case collapsed, wasting vast sums of public money and police time but at least the BPI got some free publicity.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Not in the City of London borough it doesn't. Hit Wikipedia, check out the City of London area. Make sure you check out the section on Elections.
In short, the area has very few (under 10,000) actual residents. It's right in the centre of London. It's almost all businesses. It's the only borough in the UK where businesses representatives can vote in local elections, and the business reps outnumber the residents by a massive margin. It's a borough that's run in the interests of businesses, not in the interests of residents. It's why this is happening there - the Police in other areas of the country have other things to worry about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
Such data is gathered by the YouGov surveys, which happen very regularly. Here's the latest report. Unsurprisingly given the sort of policies associated with the coalition government, the approval rating of Parliament splits strongly down party lines. Overall the government is unpopular with a 25% approval rating, 61% disapproval and 14% don't know. However this average disguises the fact that amongst conservative voters approval is 75% and amongst Labour voters approval is only 5%.
These sorts of figures are what you might expect from the UK. The situation is not comparable to the USA where the approval rating of Congress reflects a more deep rooted feeling that corruption is rampant and all the parties are fundamentally the same. This can be seen in the fact that disapproval of Congress is almost identical regardless of voting intention. The problems in the UK reflect a strong north/south division every bit as strong as the city/rural division in the USA, where the richer and more conservative south tends to approval of austerity due to a less systematic dependence on welfare and public sector jobs. The post-industrial north is dominated by Labour voters who never made the transition to the service/knowledge economy and where quality of life is highly dependent on government spending.
I don't have time to find more precise stats, but I suspect if you examined UK voters beliefs more closely, people would not feel that democracy itself was particularly broken. Especially not over something as trivial as piracy - only in places like Slashdot and amongst the people who read it does piracy become some kind of moral imperative. Everyone else I know treats it as a naughty pleasure. They know they're breaking the law and won't get caught, but they don't have any desire to make a big moral campaign of it.
What? Didn't you know?
RIAA has kept billions in royalties for decades because they "couldn't find" the artist. Even though one of the names on the list of artists owed money were "Dolly Parton". Not exactly unreachable...
They also infringed on the copyrights of LAME programmers when Sony took no hit whatsoever from the industry for their acts.
MPAA moved to Hollywood to avoid patents and EVERYONE knows about how "Hollywood Accounting" ensures that profits are never reported, fraudulently. Look too at the similarities between "The Lion King" and "Simba, The Albino Lion".
They really do not give a shit over copyright. Only their rights.