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

[infolation]

Then let's set aside 'ethical' issues, and look at it, step-by-step, from a legal perspective, since that is how the police view it. I'm not a lawyer, but UK law is written in fairly plain english:

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.

Re:Hmm

[pla]

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.

Re: Hmm

[KGIII]

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.