Wrongful Arrest Demonstrates Dangers Of Law Enforcement Listening To Bogus Industry Claims

from the a-little-late dept

It's getting pretty ridiculous watching law enforcement and politicians simply take the entertainment industry at their word in attacking various individuals who they misleadingly blame for their own inability to adapt to a modern digital era. We've seen it here in the US, where Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group has been seizing domains on extremely questionable industry-provided evidence. Over in the UK, it's been leading to wrongful arrests. A few years back, of course, the industry pointed fingers at Alan Ellis, an admin for OiNK, but a trial found him not guilty of the weakened charges of "conspiracy to defraud."

In October, we noted similarities to the Ellis situation with the news that the police had arrested a guy somehow connected to Mulve, a music search and download app that hosted no files and didn't even involve file sharing -- it just created a front-end of a Russian social network where the files were uploaded by users. After the guy was arrested, people began pointing out that the guy hadn't even programmed Mulve. He had just registered the domain name.

At least this time the police didn't go through a whole wasteful trial before realizing it had totally screwed up. They've apparently told the guy that they're not moving forward with any case against him. Of course, he still had to deal with months of worries about bogus charges and having all of his electronics and computer equipment seized.

So, at what point does law enforcement stop listening to the entertainment industry every time it freaks out about some new technology? After all, this is the same group of folks who can't even figure out how to send a letter to the right editor when they don't like an article. And yet the police think they can accurately point fingers for their business model problems?

Filed Under: arrests, copyright, law enforcement
Companies: mulve

Details In Mulve Arrest Highlight How Weak The Case Is

from the so-why-so-quick-on-the-arrest? dept

Last week, in talking about how one of the guys behind Mulve was arrested by UK police, we noted the similarities to the arrest a few years ago of OiNK administrator Alan Ellis on "conspiracy to defraud" charges that were eventually thrown out as Ellis didn't actually break the law.

TorrentFreak now has the details of the Mulve arrest, where police are using the exact same charges, even with a failure to get those charges to stick against Ellis. And, the article details why such charges are even weaker against the Mulve guy they arrested. First of all, he had nothing to do with the software itself, but merely registered the domain and created the video highlighting how to use the software. But, much more interesting are the details behind Mulve. It's not even a search engine by itself. It's simply an interface for an existing search engine on a Russian social network, which anyone could sign up for and get access to already. In other words, going after Mulve totally misses the point, and it's difficult to see how Mulve itself actually violates UK law.

Of course, in pushing authorities to arrest the Mulve guy, it appears that all that's really happened is the recording industry has drawn a lot more attention to how Mulve works, leading to multiple clones of the software quickly popping up. You would think the industry would know by now how this whole hydra process works, but apparently they still haven't gotten the message.

Filed Under: arrest, conspiracy to defraud, interface, mulve, search engines, uk
Companies: ifpi, mulve

UK Police Arrest Mulve Operators

from the um,-what? dept

Over the last few weeks, there's been a lot of talk about Mulve, an application that was released that apparently made it quite easy to download all sorts of music for free. We didn't write about it, because we don't tend to write about new apps like that, but it has been interesting to watch the reaction to it. The Mulve software itself is really a search engine, apparently searching a cache of music found on a Russian social network. The RIAA was able to take Mulve down briefly, but it quickly came back up. Now, TorrentFreak is reporting that Mulve's operators have been arrested by the UK police.

Details are pretty scarce at this time, but I can't fathom any criminal provision that could stick here. This reminds me a lot of when UK police arrested OiNK's admin, Alan Ellis, and only afterwards realized that it didn't look like OiNK actually broke any laws. So, it tried to charge him with "conspiracy to defraud the music industry." After a few wasted years, a jury finally found him not guilty.

Either way, arresting these guys seems like pure overkill. The software is a search engine. Yes, the search engine finds and lets people download music (from elsewhere on the internet) in an unauthorized fashion, but so does Google. At the very least, let a civil trial happen. It's difficult to see how this should involve the police and any sort of criminal lawsuits.

Filed Under: arrest, copyright, uk
Companies: mulve