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

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.

Comments

Re:Hmm

[wbr1]

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.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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