Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UK Man Faces Prison For Circumventing UK's Pirate Site Blockade (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by timothy on from the please-change-first-name-to-Jhzubuzzoff dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news from TorrenFreak that a Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK has charged a man for operating proxy sites and services that let fellow Internet users in the UK bypass local pirate site blockades. In a first of its kind prosecution, the Bakersfield resident is charged with several fraud offenses and one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property. During the summer of 2014, City of London Police arrested the then 20-year-old Callum Haywood of Bakersfield for his involvement with several proxy sites and services. Haywood was interrogated at a police station and later released on bail. He agreed to voluntarily hand over several domain names, but the police meanwhile continued working on the case. I wonder if the same logic applies to customers of the shrinking number of VPNs that can be used to bypass other kinds of country-level controls.

6 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm by liqu1d · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wonder how much taxpayers money was wasted on this effort.

    1. Re:Hmm by wbr1 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This is the world now. It is a form of corporate welfare. Issues that should be civil and handled by the corporation's at their cost are legislated into criminal issues where the taxpayers bear the cost burden. Privatize the profits, socialize the expenses.

      Of course this does not even touch upon whether it is ethical to jail people for these types of offenses. Hint, it isn't.

      --
      Silence is a state of mime.
    2. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, but the media companies should start pirating their own content since pirates clearly have higher revenues than they do according to them.

    3. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Was his service for the ISPs or the citizens?
      Was the court order for the ISPs or the citizens?

      If the court order did not mention him, he was not circumventing the court order.
      If the answers to the above questions don't match, he wasn't helping someone else circumvent the court order.

  2. Same in North Korea and China by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Using proxies to bypass government mandated restrictions on Internet use is illegal in some other authoritarian countries. Why should be UK be any different?

  3. Similar to tax dodging by Christian+Smith · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This appears to be a "spirit of the law" sort of case. While nothing he has done is in itself criminal (he's laundered no money, and personally committed no fraud) he has assisted others in potentially performing now criminal acts.

    So how is this any different to myriad of tax evasion schemes, which also fly in the face of the "spirit of the law"? I'd rather the powers that be concentrate on the (IMO) fraudulent actions of large (and small) corporations denying the people of this country reasonable tax income.