London Police Order Registrars To Shut Down A Bunch Of Websites Without Any Legal Basis; Threaten Registrars If They Don't Comply
from the due-process-matters dept
Just a few months ago, the City of London Police announced that it had set up a special " Intellectual Property Crime Unit" -- which was immediately, and gleefully, welcomed by the legacy record labels. The whole thing seemed fairly bizarre, given that copyright should generally be a civil issue, and even when it's a criminal issue, at best it should be a federal issue, not a local police issue -- especially when you have local police who almost certainly don't understand the basic nuances of copyright issues. However, in what appears to be an effort to justify their existence, the City of London IP Crimes Unit has jumped into the deep end without looking. Beyond quickly arresting some folks, this week they demanded that EasyDNS take down a website for a BitTorrent search engine, claiming copyright infringement, based on their claims alone.
Furthermore, Jeftovic notes that the police ordered him to redirect all of the traffic to a different site that promotes some content services that the entertainment industry likes, and noted that this was a fairly obscene form of intimidation for the sake of local protectionism of favored industry players:Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to "some guy on the internet" sending emails. While that's plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn't fly here.
We have an obligation to our customers and we are bound by our Registrar Accreditation Agreements not to make arbitrary changes to our customers settings without a valid FOA (Form of Authorization). To supersede that we need a legal basis. To get a legal basis something has to happen in court.
The request also suggests we look at the whois contact information for the domain (which looks perfectly valid) and go ahead and suspend the domain based on invalid whois data. Again, there's a process for that, you have to go through the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint process and most of the time that doesn't result in a takedown anyway.
What gets me about all of this is that the largest, most egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right now are our own governments, spying on their own citizens, illegally wiretapping our own private communications and nobody cares, nobody will answer for it, it's just an out-of-scope conversation that is expected to blend into the overall background malaise of our ever increasing serfdom.
If I can't make various governments and law enforcement agencies get warrants or court orders before they crack my private communications then I can at least require a court order before I takedown my own customer.
In other words, they are ordering us to take down competing websites, with no legal basis, hijacking the traffic, and redirecting it to competing commercial services, all of which are based out of (guess where?) London, UK.This whole thing is fairly stunning, and Jeftovic even suggests he wasn't sure it was real at first, though the headers from the email suggest that it's legit. Furthermore, it appears that this was not a one-off situation. TorrentFreak is reporting that the City of London Police sent out a bunch of these letters to various registrars, targeting a variety of sites -- with no evidence that there's a court order, or indeed any court case at all, with all of them. And while EasyDNS isn't complying, it appears that many other registrars did get intimidated into shutting down these sites.
The thuggish behavior and lack of due process isn't that surprising. Combine a "respect my authority" law enforcement mentality, with people who don't have much (or any) experience with the nuances (or history or purpose) of intellectual property issues, and you're going to get this kind of overreaction. Add to that the likelihood that the legacy industry helped provide the extreme (and wrong and misleading) version of copyright law, and is it any wonder that the police seemed to just start demanding websites be pulled down willy nilly just because the police think they're illegal?
If you only were to hear the legacy movie studios' and record labels' version of things, copyright is about establishing their very important business model, and anything that threatens that must be illegal. If you see a service that enables some form of infringement, well, that must be illegal, too, right? Of course, they won't realize that copyright is not about establishing a business model for those gatekeepers, that blaming tools & services for the actions of their users is a recipe for killing innovation, and (most importantly) that these things are rarely black and white. And that's why you have due process.
The City of London IP Crime Unit has only been around for a little over three months. One hopes that they'll actually learn something before pulling these kinds of censorious, abusive and thuggish stunts in the future. And, while we're at it, it seems reasonable to call for shutting down the whole unit in the first place. IP crimes are not an issue for an ignorant metropolitan police force. The unit never should have been set up in the first place, and this little cowboy censorship action highlights why the unit deserves to be quickly retired.
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Filed Under: city of london, city of london police, copyright, domain seizures, due process, london, search engines, uk
Companies: easydns
Reader Comments
The First Word
“This is a police body issuing orders to parties to shut down and censor other parties all WITHOUT A COURT ORDER. Not only that, but in the case of EasyDNS, it's a BRITISH police body demanding action from a CANADIAN domain registrar to redirect a website based in SINGAPORE (I did a WHOIS search) to competing websites based in LONDON, or the police would complain to ICANN, a body based in the USA.
Again, no courts involved.
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This is a police body issuing orders to parties to shut down and censor other parties all WITHOUT A COURT ORDER. Not only that, but in the case of EasyDNS, it's a BRITISH police body demanding action from a CANADIAN domain registrar to redirect a website based in SINGAPORE (I did a WHOIS search) to competing websites based in LONDON, or the police would complain to ICANN, a body based in the USA.
Again, no courts involved.
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What gets me about all of this is that the largest, most egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right now are our own governments, spying on their own citizens, illegally wiretapping our own private communications
So effing true.
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Also, it is amazing how the lessons of human history are never learned and history repeats itself.
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I think "billy" is a copper...
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WHICH "City of London" is this?
Since "City" is capitalized, I'll assume it's the corporation. -- And if so the assumptions of others about who's doing the evil are simply wrong: it's a corporation, directly.
Mike, disambiguate so we all know who to revile.
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Re: WHICH "City of London" is this?
Is the "request" any less illegal?
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Re: WHICH "City of London" is this?
Does that sum it up?
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Re: WHICH "City of London" is this?
City of London is the private corporation. The city itself is split up int 33 districts which each have a council who run their on patch.
tl:dr look up basic info for yourself you lazy cretin.
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Re: Re: WHICH "City of London" is this?
Also, a small fact, i usually read TD in my smartphone, so i always view all comments.
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Re: WHICH "City of London" is this?
It is one of the last of English local councils, possibly the last, to keep the old style of corporation (which in its broadest sense means any association of individuals with a legal identity distinct from its members, and in England used to refer to local government bodies more often than it did to private companies).
It is thus a public body, though one with interesting quirks (like the fact that businesses get to vote in its elections, with a number of votes proportional
to their number of employees).
And City of London != London; think, loosely, New York County (=~ Borough of Manhattan) vs New York City.
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Surely, such a black and white issue would be a slam dunk in the court system.
Care to comment on that?
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Yes. Because there's no need.
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Since when has it been the role of any police force to disrupt the activities of people that they merely suspect are about to take part in criminal activity in order to prevent that activity?
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You heard it first here folks. The courts are no completely unnecessary. Stand up and take a bow, you completely foolish ignoramus whose fantasy while masturbating is of him/herself licking the boots of someone from the copyright cartels.
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Got it.
What could go wrong?
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average_joe just hates it when due process is enforced.
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Pirates sure do have it tough.
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May contain satire
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The UK is becoming more and more authoritarian every day. As a libertarian, nothing is scarier.
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Filthy but lovely.
The police though is not, grumpy bastards.
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Fucking Weasels
In other words, we're the law, do what we say or we'll file complaints with your licensing authority. Oh, and if we're wrong, you're on your own.
The only proper response to this letter is "Piss off."
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Re: Fucking Weasels
Emphasis mine.
Mike might not want to risk any trips to London anytime soon.
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Re: Re: Fucking Weasels
Anyone else having trouble with HTML tags and the comment preview lately?
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City of London vs. London
CGPGrey Explains the difference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
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"PIPCU and its staff...accept no responsibility"
:-p
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So, it was successful when it was the serious organised crime agency, maybe the city of london police just didn't have the same non legal balls to pull it off.
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And rightfully so.
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Always demand a court order/warrant.
The average police officer/civil servant is completely ignorant of the criminal code.
Your best defense against authorities is silence...ignore them.
If they accost you at gunpoint assert your right to remain silent.
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This is not the police force you think it is
The City of London is a tiny little piece of land at the center of the larger London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Police
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
So the people coming after him have even less status than the Metropolitan London police.
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Oh, fun fact: only about 10,000 people actually live in the area policed by the City of London police but they employ over 1,100 people. A police force with over 10% the population of the people they are supposedly there to protect and serve.
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EasyDNS full response
http://blog.easydns.org/2013/10/08/whatever-happened-to-due-process/
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Gotta love double standards
What is it about 'IP protection/enforcement' people that causes them to avoid the courts as much as possible? Is it an allergy, a lack of knowledge, or simply that they know 99% of their actions won't stand up in court with even against the most basic defense on behalf of the accused?
Given how desperate they are to avoid ever having both sides in a court almost every time, it's got to be one of those.
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I�m Conflicted
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nasty government
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As to all the synthetic outrage about 'due process' and 'court orders', domain registrars, search engines, email providers, and other key internet actors routinely take action against spammers and malware distributors without a court order, either on their own initiative or in response to complaints. I don't recall Techdirt ever objecting to that. So why the double standard? Could it be that nobody likes spam or malware, but a lot of people like getting stuff for free?
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1) Jurisdiction - A London Police force CANNOT give orders to anyone outside their area of operation. EasyDNS is based in Canada, and the site the police wanted taken down was based in and registered in Singapore, so you've got a police body who are nominally responsible for literally a square mile of turf (anything outside the City of London is under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police Service) demanding that someone on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC follow their orders, to take down a site based half-way across the planet.
2) Economic collusion - The orders to EasyDNS were not just to shut down the site in question, but to re-route its IP address to "legal" commercial sites. The site in question is a Bittorent search engine, as in, functionally the same as Google (as long as you type in ".torrent" along with whatever you're searching for into Google). Imagine if the City of London Police had demanded from Google's DNS operator (and yes I know, they have their own DNS service) to shut down Google and re-route Google's IP address to a search engine based in the UK.
3) Due Process. What do you mean synthetic outrage? The outrage here is real. If you take the time to read the email EasyDNS got, it has wonderful language like
"We have identified the following domain(s) that we say are facilitating online crime.
torrentpond.com"
That is a police body unilaterally declaring that a site is guilty of a crime. Police ARE NOT supposed to say things like that. They are supposed to investigate and if necessary arrest yes, but no police force (at least in a nation that is supposed to be democratic) has the power to say you are actually committing a crime. They are supposed to say things like "You are under arrest for suspicion of committing XYZ". It is the courts, judges and juries, who are supposed to look at evidence gathered and then pronounce guilt.
Lastly, it doesn't matter whether EasyDNS does things like this on their own, that has absolutely nothing to do with this. This is about a police body vastly exceeding its authority and jurisdiction, to threaten sites and businesses located half-way across the planet to help their buddies (the City of London police have long been known to be little more than private police for the businesses in that square mile).
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...and here we see one of the major issues with this debate. Some people can't understand genuine concern, so they reject it out of hand.
Let me tell you - any concern I note about all this crap is totally genuine.
"I don't recall Techdirt ever objecting to that."
Just because you don't recall it, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. A quick surface level search provides a few related stories about spammers straight off, there's probably a lot more if I had time to do your research for you:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060831/111504.shtml (overbearing filters removing spams without notice)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060127/020231.shtml (difficulty categorising spam vs. legit emails)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20031216/0931208.shtml (criticism of the CAN-SPAM law and how it won't be effective for its intended purpose)
You might also notice that these articles are from 2006 and before. If you don't see many such articles since, it means that the problems have been addressed or are no longer relevant. The same will happen with the discussions on fair use rights, overbearing enforcement and removal of due process, if these stop happening.
"So why the double standard? Could it be that nobody likes spam or malware, but a lot of people like getting stuff for free?"
...and here with have the same old lie - people are objecting so they must be pirates? No wonder this never gets anywhere, the strawman has been constructed and the windmills tilted at before the objections are even formed.
My opinion is the same for any of these subjects - the law must be upheld, but not at the expense of the rights and freedoms of either legitimate businesses or innocent individuals. Stop making up lies about those of us who object and start addressing the real concerns.
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