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.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as much as you might suppose. The "City of London" Police force is not the general police force for the City of London (Odd I know) it is literally only responsible of the area inside the "Square mile" that is a bought-and-paid for feudal fiefdom inside the rest of the UK democracy. The "police" there pretty much serve corporate interests only. Thankfully very few people actually live inside the square mile not their influence is much less than you'd expect. It is a very strange legacy of out past that is now very difficult for us to rid ourselves of, because of corporate backing.

But it doesn't represent London proper nor the rest of the UK

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.