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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.
I will find it hard if they find him guilty under the charges, but with DUMB judges who believe the cattrap the plod talk about I suspect he will do down. The thing is that UK BLOCKING is not legal. Their is not UK law derived from Parliment that create the law, hell not ALL ISPs are are even covered by the court order to block site as it only the few biggest one which have to block. So this guy is being led to slaughter for a crime that does not exist and in now legal law, hell it would have to be EVERY UK ISP to be forced to block to get any where near it
No where near as much as the police expended on this investigation. They moved hell and high water to help those rich cunts. Next time some prick steals your car, or bicycle, or even breaks into your home: just note how fucking useless the cops are. They simply don't give a shit. Fucking traitors to the working class.
In China I can download all the copyright stuff I want. Then I go back to Hong Kong (or just put on my VPN) to access the censored stuff. But by doing so I can no longer access some pirate Chinese site that only accept China IP address.
Each country has different standards of acceptable and not. It's hard to say one is better than other, like blocking political stuffs is worse than blocking copyright violations. All are bad, and we as citizens of whatever country we come from have to oppose censorship, no matter the content.
There is no law in the UK that stops people accessing The Pirate Bay. There is a court injunction, obtain by a consortium of media companies.
The injunction tells UK ISPs they must block access to specific websites (URLS) under a 'section 97'
That refers to section 97 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The High Court (in Scotland, the Court of Session) shall have power to grant an injunction against a service provider, where that service provider has actual knowledge of another person using their service to infringe copyright.
The service providers listed in that injunction were Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2, Virgin Media and BT
This has also been an issue with other Pirate Bay proxy sites, for example the BFI attempted to get the Pirate Party's Pirate Bay proxy shut down, unsuccessfully.
Amongst all these laws and injunctions, I don't see mention of anything that would refer to Callum Haywood's site, except the unsuccessful BFI attempt, since that's the only one that concerns a proxy. His site isn't one that's listed in the injunction but, even if it was, the UK ISPs listed should already be blocking it at a network level in the same way they block the original Pirate Bay.
This didn't circumvent the court order. The order didn't apply to Joe Sixpack, it applied to a specific list of ISPs and ordered them to take a specific set of actions.
In no way does running a proxy interfere with the ability of BT to block an official list of UKIP... er, I mean, piracy sites.
I recall years ago socialists complaining about how companies had unlimited deep pockets and could use civil courts at their leisure to crush individuals who couldn't afford to protect themselves with equally high priced lawyers.
So the socialists pushed for a "fair" system whereby everyone paid into it with their tax dollars and everyone had an "equal" and "fair" chance at justice.
This is the usual result of applying legislation to a social issue.
Revoke copyright after 5 years
Unlike the USA, I don't think there would be any legal problem with that.
In UK law, the GCHQ data is legal (or at least - you'd have a hard time proving otherwise)
If GCHQ provided data to the police, then that's just a source giving a tip-off to the police.
We don't have any equivalent of the fourth amendment, and the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' doctrine is not nearly so strong here if it applies at all.
Having said that - it seems perfectly plausible that they police got a tip-off from someone other than GCHQ. Perhaps somebody who wanted the £20k reward - and who quite properly is not being named.
IANAL
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Back in the 1980s, I was in my second enlistment to get more money for college. They sent me off to learn to drive small and medium sized vehicles - even some training on larger stuff. Anyhow, one of my instructors made a comment that has stuck with me all these years.
"As the fucking commies get more freedom, we get less. It's like it's seeking an equilibrium. Like we're going to meet in the center someday. I wonder if it's intentional."
I won't speculate as to the latter but it does seem to have some merit. Also, I'm pretty sure that's 100% verbatim.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."