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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."
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.