Meanwhile....
.... a spokesperson from "Citizens Resisting Acronyms Please" said; the recent explosion in shortened titles was a crime against humanity.
City of London Police are claiming credit for the suspension of 40 ad-funded websites that provided unauthorised access to copyright-protected content – but may have caused a rise in the number of web ads carrying malware or promoting pornography. Operation Creative has resulted in the suspension of 40 national and …
Well, it supposedly deters terrorists. In the good ol' United States of the Americas the Department of Homeland Security is entrusted with the same task, they stop terrorists, therefor "pirating" copyrighted material is a terrorist action.
I am happy they are now actively stopping these dreadful terrorists in the U.K. too. I feel safer already.
"Initiative Operation Creative helps to protect advertisers by ensuring that their ads don’t appear on illegal, IP infringing websites..."
It says it all right there. Not porn, but protecting US economic interests, well, the US studios anyway.
Hey, we get a free play after having to deal for so many years of yielding to your request for Operation Ajax.
Yes, what bothers me is that a random police force has taken it upon themselves to investigate a civil case that affects the whole nation, rather than, you know, policing the city of london? Complete rubbish, they should be banned from acting outside of their jurisdiction and not concentrating on criminal cases.
They are not a 'random police force'. The City of London Police have a designated UK-wide role in dealing with financial crime and various other matters, which now includes IP crime. (Just as, e.g., the Metropolitan Police have a national and international role in anti-terrorism.) Also, of course, they are dealing with criminal copyright infringement, not a 'civil case'.
Resulting in huge amounts of taxpayers money being thrown into the wind.
Fighting piracy by these means is about as fruitfull as shoveling snow around the north pole.
On a more positive note, the fat cats at the top of these Acronym ridden agencies continue to earn small fortunes..... regardless of the outcome the boys at the top retain their jobs.
I actually did that for a few months...
During my college days I was taken along with a group of other students up to the Arctic as I was one of the few people that knew how to fix the equipment they were using (They were also quadrupling my pay for the duration of the expedition, hard to say no to that). While I spent some of my time actually doing my job (fixing the effects of extreme thermal-cycling, replacing seized motors, etc) I spent the majority of my time clearing snow from around the doors and external equipment to prevent us from freezing to death.
Although you can build some awesome, and warm, snow-forts up there.
Compare and contrast the police reaction to incidents where corporations are affected to those where hundreds of thousands of members of the public are affected by a mass invasion of privacy by the telecoms companies:
https://nodpi.org/2013/11/27/one-last-protest-avon-and-somerset-pcc-police-public-forum/
Incidentally, if intercepting communications really isn't a crime then perhaps somebody ought to have a word with Coulson?
"Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI, said: “The early results from Operation Creative show that through working with the police and the online advertising industry, we can begin to disrupt the funding that sustains illegal websites."
We don't know that they were illegal, there was no criminal convictions. They were suspected and on that basis ISPs were told to redirect access. Even if they were clearly breaking the law, it's devolving to the level of we don't like you so we're going to throw the book at you. It's only a matter of time before this gets abused (if it hasn't already).
... as the Police haven't released the list of sites they shut down, so how am I going to find them now, it's clearly been long enough for them to re-start the site elsewhere with a slightly different URL that will clearly be blocked by my ISP until I fire up Tor Browser.
"a formal ‘prevention and deterrent’ process began to encourage infringing websites to engage with the police, to correct their behaviour and to begin to operate legitimately. "
So how did that go then?
Since most of the type of site they talk about work because they offer content to the world, and stuff that is not available at all from the Hollywood types...
The illegal sites were taken down after the owner was convicted of what crime?
This is getting silly now, justice no longer being equally applied.
BTW, I bet you the streaming sites they are talking about contain football streams....
PPS and the comment about there being a malware surge as some of the sites swap from the mainstream ads to other ones.... well thats like the old FAST advert about copied games funding terrorism and child abuse...
The City of London Police appear to be writing nasty letters to sites as well as domain registry providers even though they are out of their jurisdiction. No legal basis to shut the sites down so attempting to scare them in to submission on behalf of the media monsters.
Obviously the sites are dodgy but I doubt they are hurting UK IP holders one bit, yet alone needing a department in the City of London Police to harass them and their business partners with non-legal letters.
The upside of this is that the Internet *always* routes around damage. The CoLP are an attacker and will eventually be rebuffed and kicked off of the Internet. Hopefully we will be able to identify other entities and individuals involved so the suspension from the Internet applies to them as well.
We need an equivalent to RBL that identifies these attackers so that their IP traffic only goes where it is welcome. Hint:It is not welcome here.
"FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft)"
Ahh - fans of irony, I see!
Additionally, I was unaware that there was a problem with people depriving copyright owners of the legal rights to their own work.
Actually, hang on a minute - I have heard of such a thing, it's just that it's usually record labels who are doing it...