When The Entertainment Industry Can't Legally Shut Down A Site It Doesn't Like, Bogus Charges Can Do The Trick

from the industry-bullies dept

Back in 2009, we wrote about how anti-piracy organization FACT worked closely with UK law enforcement to have the guy who operated Filesoup arrested. At the time, we noted that it wasn't at all clear what he was doing that was illegal, as the site was merely a forum. Though some people did, in fact, use that forum for the sake of infringement, that shouldn't implicate the forum host. And, in fact, after about a year and a half, the courts dropped the case, realizing that the arguments the industry kept feeding law enforcement didn't add up to anything illegal. The court noted that the charges never should have been brought in the first place. Of course, that's small comfort to the folks who ran the site and had to go through this ordeal. The site has announced that it's shutting down, and the arrests and lawsuits were a big part of what killed it.

Filed Under: bullying, fact, forums, liability
Companies: filesoup

UK Court Dismisses Yet Another Bogus Criminal Lawsuit Against Torrent Tracker Admins

from the and-yet-they'll-do-it-again dept

Just about a year ago, a court in the UK found OiNK's operator, Alan Ellis, not guilty of criminal charges for running the community. Even though plenty of people had pointed out from the very beginning that it was crazy to charge Ellis with criminal charges for actions by people in the community, prosecutors still went through with it. What was even more amazing is that they continued to try to do the same thing to others as well. In the summer of 2009, we wrote about how UK police arrested the operator of the FileSoup community based entirely on claims by the entertainment industry, which showed a near total lack of understanding of the basic technology at play. It turns out that law enforcement pushed forward with the case, despite the fact that they did no investigating on their own and simply accepted the industry's claims as fact, despite numerous errors. Thankfully, the courts recognized all of this and noted that these criminal charges probably never should have been brought and dropped the case against two of the admins of the site. At what point do law enforcement folks realize that the entertainment industry is a biased party and that you can't just accept everything they say as fact?

Filed Under: filesoup, oink, torrents, uk
Companies: filesoup

Entertainment Industry Decides FileSoup Doesn't Have Enough Publicity; Has Owner Arrested

from the forums-are-bad,-m'kay? dept

A bunch of people have been submitting variations on the story that a guy who runs a site called FileSoup has been arrested. FileSoup apparently was a tracker site for a while, but for the past few years has actually just been a forum where people post links -- many of which, one assumes, were for unauthorized content. It's a little unclear what he was arrested for. At times they quizzed him about FileSoup (and didn't seem to fully understand the technology). But on the form they gave him, it said he was arrested for downloading movies (to which he wonders why that's not a civil offense). It'll be worth watching as more details come out, but it's a bit troubling when someone is arrested for running a forum, when the real concern is the actions of the people in the forum, rather than the forum host (admittedly, they may have evidence of direct infringement by him as well, but the questioning seemed to cover the operation of FileSoup itself).

Either way, you do have to wonder what good this does the entertainment industry or anti-piracy organization FACT (who many believe is closely involved in the investigation -- though that has not been confirmed). Frankly, I'd never heard of FileSoup, and having the name in headlines all over is likely to only give it that much more attention. The same thing has happened in the past multiple times, including with sites like The Pirate Bay, which most people had never heard of prior to it being raided by the government. So, as long as the site remains up, more people find out about it. If the site goes down, the users quickly scatter to alternative sites. What has the entertainment industry accomplished? Not much useful.

Filed Under: file sharing, forum, uk
Companies: filesoup