UK cops: Keep yer golden doubloons, ad folk. Yon websites belong to pirates British police have launched a who's who of pirating websites in an attempt to stop advertisers from spending money with sites deemed illegal. The Infringing Website List is hoping to cut copyright-breaking websites off at the knees by stopping their top source of revenue: advertising. The database will be available to brands …
What about all those advertisers who pay for ads on the sites and in print of tabloid newspapers?
If the advetisers don't read the Guardian/Private Eye they might not have heard of the illegal phone hacking activities by the newspapers. With this legislation the CoLP will be able to warn people not to advertise in the Sun.
Right. So we're going to ask the good ol' chaps at big advertising companies to grow a conscience and avoid sites that peddle pirate software, even if it brings in great click-throughs? Yeah, good luck with that one. What about companies with international holdings? Why would they care about a site in a different company with copyright infringing material?
I'm still not sure why 'pirate sites' would get great clickthroughs to begin with. I mean, who the hell goes looking for a NOCD patch for some game they got in 1998, and then says to himself, "Hey - I wanted to play some Unreal, but all of these hot girls are like living *right next to me*! I'm gonna get me some of THAT action! *click*"?
None of what the City of London Police do for their Hollywood friends has any basis in law.
Previously they have 'asked nicely' some admins, with public whois details who reside in the UK, to close down their site but not taken any legal action. They also wrote to domain registrars to ask them to suspend domains even though there was no legal basis and often the sites were not registered or hosted in the UK, so totally our of their jurisdiction too.
Now once again we see them attacking sites based on MPAA/RIAA wish list without any legal oversight and probably no jurisdiction again either.
The City of London Police are just corporate lap dogs using their name in an attempt to achieve results without any legal backing.
it would be like trying to stop the sun from shining, it can't be done effectively - all you have to do to circumvent the block is to find a proxy in a country that DOESN'T block the site in question and you are past the block put on in your own country.
also pirate bay have released 'the pirate browser' that can access all these blocked sites via the TOR network making it impossible to block the sites as you completely bypass the blocks put in place by your ISP.
But that requires court action, legal arguments, obtaining injunctions and serving them and all those other time consuming and expensive legal oversights.
Instead what we have here is the content industry drawing up a wish list of sites they want to impact and then the tame muppets from the City of London Police to sign off on the list to give it a semblance of legality, after all, the police never get it wrong do they?
Of course we all know that everyone's favourite not evil search engine indexes torrents, will we see the plod blacklisting that site and cutting off its revenue stream? Perhaps I should google for the answer......
"Forgive my ignorance but would it just not be easier to block the domain from being accessed in the UK?"
-but what if the site in question isn't actually doing anything _illegal_, or even dodgy enough to get it blocked.. or even worse.. it IS illegal/unlawful/could potentially be used to commit something which technically isn't actually a crime, and you CAN have it blocked, but outside of the UK, somewhere, someone is viewing said adds?
What is needed her is obviously the online equivalent of being able to arrest someone for wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8EpfyCG2Y
> What is needed her is obviously the online equivalent of being able to arrest someone for wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area :)
This is pretty sad, probably, but without following the link I already know you're talking about Constable Savage. :-b
You're not. This is a Double Jeopardy thing where, if they find you guilty on one account, they can automatically double the sentence by grandly stating that you were also in cahoots with one of these evil (as defined by corporate copyright holders) sites to defeat Freedom and Liberty for All.
Then they do a Grand Slam by noting that your nefarious activities were tantamount to terrism, and the heavy metal door goes Clang! on your future while the music industry snorts another line of white off a pristine hooker's bum in celebration of its benevolent oversight.
All they're doing is setting up a stool so that we fall from higher up when they "catch" us.
It could be that this newly created db of 'illegal' sites may actually be more useful to marketing companies than expected; now there exists a single source of potential targets to get cheap(er) web advertising! Now, I'm not saying the entire marketing sector is totally unscrupulous, I'm just saying that the entire marketing sector is totally unscrupulous.
Sounds like the BPI dictating UK laws again.
Just who on the BPI has friends in high places or how much of their cash is going directly into bribes?
Defend it with the much loved "think of the children!" defense all you want, but these guys should not be in the position of power they seem to be with our legal system and legislators.
"If an advert from an established brand appears on an infringing website, not only does it lend the site a look of legitimacy, but inadvertently the brand and advertiser are funding online crime," PIPCU's head, detective chief inspector Andy Fyfe, said in a canned statement
Would that be Barney's British cousin?
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