City Of London Police Drove 200 Miles To Arrest And Jail 'Industrial' Level Pirate... Only To Have Case Fall Apart And All Charges Dropped
from the oops,-sorry-'bout-that dept
We've certainly questioned the efforts by the City of London Police to set themselves up as the legacy entertainment industry's private police force. Over the past year or so, the police operation (which, yes, represents just one square mile of London, but a square mile with lots of big important businesses), has demonstrated that it will be extremely aggressive, not in fighting criminal wrongdoing, but in protecting the private business interests of some legacy companies, often with little to no legal basis. It also appears that the City of London's famed Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is not particularly technology savvy, and seems to just accept what big record labels, movie studios and the like tell it.In the last few months, the City of London Police's PIPCU effort has even gone on a bit of an arresting spree, under questionable circumstances. We noted in August that they had arrested the operator of an anti-censorship proxy service, almost entirely based on the say so of the entertainment industry. In September, PIPCU took a 200+ mile drive up the road to arrest Zain Parvez to great fanfare. PIPCU insisted that Parvez was running a series of streaming sites related to sporting events, and was infringing on the rights of the Premier League (notorious copyright maximalists). PIPCU claimed it was an "industrial scale" operation, and tossed Parvez in jail.
Fast forward a few weeks and... all charges against Parvez have been dropped. Apparently, once the case reached the Manchester Crown Court and the Crown Prosecution Services looked at it, they realized how weak a case there was, and simply dropped the whole thing. Given PIPCU's previous statements and actions, this hardly seems surprising. PIPCU and the City of London Police appear to be the latest in an unfortunately long line of folks who think that copyright infringement is such a black-and-white/open-and-shut thing that you can just declare someone "guilty" based on some questionable assumptions and it's obvious for everyone to understand why.
Perhaps, the UK's Intellectual Property Office, rather than funding PIPCU to be the legacy industry's personal police force, should have spent those resources actually training them to understand technology, due process and such.
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Filed Under: arrest, charges, city of london police, copyright, dropped, pipcu, zain parvez
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For which the relevant quote would be:
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.'
-Upton Sinclair
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Well, shoot!
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Re: Well, shoot!
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Not that it matters, but I'm commenting from Golden, Colorado and enjoying a well aged Glen Moray tonight.
Stay safe my friends.
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....with the permission of the local force.
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Also, there are rules about informing local forces about operating in their areas, to reduce the risk of one force (or even a squad or division) blundering in on another's investigation, although they're not absolute.
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They've had to settle a number of cases for high value amounts, but these tend to be out of court and subject to NDA (which is odd, given they would fall under FOIA rules)
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We are paying for this either way......
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Jurisdiction.
Because Jurisdiction doesn't work the same way in the UK. Any English Police officer can enforce the law in any police force area they want. Its traditional for them to ask for local help, but this is more for backup purposes, and they certainly don't have to.
Also, some police forces have specialized departments which are shared. West Yorkshire have a very good specialist forensic team, City of London are allegedly a center of excellence for Financial Fraud and IT cases, although sometimes i wonder... But i digress.
Point is If a Met police officer wants to arrest you in Manchester, S(he) can go and do it.
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AIUI the understanding is that so long as the City acts on the "advice" of English judges and enacts all English laws (which occurs automatically), businesses there pay taxes, etc., and generally behaves as though it is part of England, England won't annex it. There are a few other quirks resulting from this, although they're gradually being whittled away (for example, stolen goods must be returned to their owner unless they've been sold within the City).
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no ? ? ?
huh, that seems, um, odd...
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England isn't a series of states and counties and cities that have their own police forces. There is no London Police force who only have jurisdiction in London. There is just the British Police force. When people talk about the Met or City of London Police, these are NOT police raised from and 'citizens' of London or the City of London or whoever. Each of these forces really are just precincts. Any NY Police officer has jurisdiction in all of NYCs 5 boroughs, however they are assigned to precincts who usually just deal with crime in those precincts, however if their suspect is in another precinct, they can still go and arrest them, as they are still within their jurisdiction.
So this isn't the equivalent of Boston PD coming to NY, it's the equivalent of the officers from the 9th Precinct (Manhattan South) going and arresting someone in 77th Precinct (Brooklyn North)
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Solely because they are police and we should blindly trust them right?
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The police should have a reputation so spotless that the public would automatically trust their judgement!
Unfortunately, because of this and previous ****ups we have come to distrust them.
I wonder if they will ever earn back that unconditional trust...
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I suppose it's possible they may have threatened him with all sorts of 'possible' fines and jail sentences, and he folded under the threats, but other than that, 'They realized they'd never convince a judge to convict him based upon the evidence they had' is quite likely the reason.
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Oink, Filesoup and other bogus busts serve a purpose
So although the entertainment industries suffered a 'technical' failure, they enjoyed a de facto win. This has been a winning strategy for Hollywood for a long time, as few site owners have the will to stand up for their rights and keep on fighting after an ordeal such as being the target of a wrongful criminal prosecution.
This is how "order" is maintained in the UK, not by purely legal means, but by thuggery and intimidation designed to scare people from continuing an activity that a court has judged to be legal.
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even better would have been to spend those resources on educating the industries, so that they actually gave the customers what they keep asking, even begging for! the problem is, there are none so deaf as those that wont listen and none so blind as those that wont look!
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Some simple reasoning is required here
Look, you're not following their chain of 'reasoning'.
1. Copyright IS Censorship. [Axiom]
2. Therefore an Anti-Censorship site is an Anti-Copyright site. [From step 1.]
3. Anti-Copyright == Piracy! (and Terrorism!). [Copyright maximalist sacred scrolls, ch.666 v.42]
4. Therefore an Anti-Copyright site is a Piracy site. [From step 3.]
5. Therefore an Anti-Censorship site is a Piracy site. [From step 2 followed by 4.]
I rest my case.. The operators of an Anti-Censorship site should be subject to capital punishment. See how simple that was?
Since terrorism and piracy is involved [From step 3.] no expense should be spared. No laws, facts or common sense should stand in the way.
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n. Anti-Censorship == Anti-Copyright == Promotes paedophilia (Think of the children!).
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The PIPCU is nothing more than a Hollywood paid for hand puppet.
The more the PIPCU try to justify their branching out from parking tickets or whatever they were doing before FACT came along, the more they look like an inept law enforcement agency that got caught up in the excitement of doing something besides handing out parking tickets.
The CPS basically looked at the case and the alleged evidence which was not provided by the PIPCU but by FACT which is a private entity and not a law enforcement agency.
The idea that the PIPCU went on a 200 mile journey based on evidence provided to it by FACT, on an investigation carried out by FACT and then proceed to arrest and charge an individual based on a information gathered by a FACT screams stupidity.
The PIPCU seems to be void of the ability to see that FACT and it's investigation and alleged evidence acquired are biased towards their own agenda.
The CPS know damn well there would be more than a few questions of why is the PIPCU going way out of their jurisdiction to arrest someone based on a private entity's investigation and evidence.
I would have to be of the belief that even a beginner law student could get a case like this thrown out of court just on the mere perception of bias on the Police & FACT partnership.
I wonder how the UK citizens like the idea of FACT running around playing copyright cops with taxpayer dollars for private companies.
The PIPCU head ought to be shuffled out the door permanently for his decision to cross the line from law enforcement to FACT's legal arm. What we still don't know is if the PIPCU are deriving a financial benefit from FACT for their enthusiastic copyright enforcemnt policies.
It will be interesting to see if this fellow who was arrested decides to sue the PIPCU and FACT for malicious prosecution.
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As others have stated here.
The 'London Police' are entirely within their bailiwick in this matter. In fact it's absolutely PIPCU's bailiwick.
Also the CPS do not care one iota, nor do the courts, who arrested whom as long as they were arrested under lawful due process and upon a preponderance of evidence that had a likelihood of success if sent before a trier of facts.
PIPCU most would not be held accountable for Mal Prosecution since that is very hard to prove since malicious intent specifically needs to be shown. Malfeasance on the other hand might be actionable since they allegedly have based their entire case including arrest upon the hearsay of one witness (FACT) without any other contributing factors and can be seen to be absolutely biased and inequitable.
For FACt to be treated more than any other victim of a crime and actually provide without any chain of evidence structures information that is taken at face beggars belief. Though this absolutely seems to be the norm in these matters.
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My employer has recently made the decision to stop paying for FACT membership because they just keep jacking up the fees year upon year.
The first thing FACT did was threaten raids and imply legal action if they didn't get a "closure meeting" - when we told them that all such meetings would be attended by lawyers and subject to audio/visual recordings which would be published on our websites they went very quiet.
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Wait, never mind. It's Manchester; the local cops have probably got more pressing demands on their time than this bullshit.
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