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Uncategorized Friday, August 17th 2012 at 8:20 pm

Hollywood Interest Group Oversees Investigation, Arrest, Prosecution of British Citizen

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This week in Profoundly Scary News: Anton Vickerman, the man behind TV-streaming link-a-palooza Surf The Channel has been sentenced to four years in jail. That’s not the scary part, though. The scary part is that the investigation into Vickerman was shepherded along at every stage not by agents of the British government, but by private contractors in the employ of a film studio trade group, the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

Timothy B. Lee has a great, in-depth report on this whole, sorry, sordid affair over at Ars Technica that you should make the 10 minutes to read. We’ll broad-stroke it for you here.

Starting in 2008, FACT hired private investigators to dig into who owned STC, which was registered anonymously and offshore by Vickerman. These investigators arranged a meet, and later got a look at Vickerman’s home by posing as potential buyers for the property. Later that summer, they helped Northumbria police officers plan and stage a raid on Vickerman’s home in hopes of finding STC’s servers — which weren’t there.

It gets weirder. Vickerman and his wife then had their assets frozen by the Bedfordshire Trading Standards Financial Investigations Unit (BTSFIU). That’s an arm of what was essentially a local banking regulator and fraud protection agency — an arm created and sponsored by FACT, with a special eye towards cracking down on movie piracy, because private organizations in the U.K. can sponsor their own pet agencies within law enforcement agencies.

The asset freeze only lasted a month, after which it became clear that the British government had no interest in prosecuting Vickerman — and wasn’t even sure that a crime had been committed. FACT, though, wasn’t done yet. Again, here’s where British law enforcement differs from the U.S. — FACT didn’t need a public prosecutor willing to take on Vickerman’s case. As long as FACT was willing to foot the bill for a trial, they could have their lawyers press charges against Vickerman with a judge acting as arbitrator.

That’s just what they did. And they won. Now, Vickerman is going to prison for four years. So, there’s that.

(via Ars Technica, whose read on this you should totally check out. For serious.)

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  • Jack Bond

    Well, he obviously isn’t innocent. I mean, people don’t just say “We’re evil copyright infringement punishing henchmen. Let’s find someone to villainize.” No. The guy hosted a website that clearly hurts industry and business. I say he got what he deserved.

  • Iamkingshit

    i find it funny everyone wants to talk about piracy “hurting the industry”, but the “industry”‘s profits have never been higher.thats almost as ignorant as saying that our gas prices are high because it costs more to produce, whereas the profits of all oil companies have increased exponentially since 2001

  • corruption

    He may not have been innocent, but it goes to show the entertainment industry is becoming a law unto itself.

    The kicker is that unless your rich you have no chance to defend yourself against the infinite money the entertainments industry can use to prosecute you… guilty or not.

  • TriannaLi

    It honestly isn’t obvious to me.  Let’s both put aside what we think of the ethics of piracy and talk about whether Vickerman broke the law.  The British government itself wasn’t certain, thus declined to prosecute.  A trial went foward not to resolve whether a law had been broken, but because a very rich company literally paid for a trial, thus bypassing the question of lawbreaking entirely.  This sends chills down my spine.

    And as for whether he deserved it as you say…harder to judge, I’ll give you that.  But at least here where I live, you can kill someone while drunk driving and get a smaller sentence than four years (an extreme example, I know, but that’s kind of my point). 

  • fail

     I was waiting for you to chime in with your opinion that is based on wrong information. He only ran a website with LINKS to infringing sites not against the law last I checked. Also hurts the industry? You better check those numbers again, he wouldn’t have even put a scratch on their investments. Third he was prosecuted by a private company this is way to overreaching, if someday a private company arrests you for being a homosexual I know your going to be crying to a different tune. And I hoe you read this so next time you actually check your facts before spouting your bullshit here. 

  • Anonymous

     Maybe,  Just Maybe,  Nobody should buy, watch, or listen to ANY content from anybody, no matter HOW good it is, nor HOW much they like the producer(Lady GaGa, this includes you)…  For a lengthy period of time, or maybe only for a significant one…  Remember the Anti SOPA  demonstration online?  Just recently, I might add…  The same goes here.   I bet the industry giants when faced with going broke for even a LITTLE while will smarten up and be less litigation minded as opposed to common sense minded…