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How Hollywood Money Put a Brit Behind Bars

Mousey

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I found this interesting reading. (Funny how the movie & music industries and the feds own everything isn't it? :rolleyes:) Grab a cuppa and commence....


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Anton Vickerman, 38-year old owner of the once popular link site surfthechannel.com (STC), was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday by a British judge. But the prosecutors sitting across the courtroom from him didn't work for the Crown—they were lawyers for the movie studio trade group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

FACT, not public officials in the UK, was the driving force behind Vickerman's prosecution. Indeed, FACT effectively took on the role of a private law enforcement agency. Private investigators....
 
He could appeal. He may even be able to prove wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution. If the seizure order is invalid, he could further claim he didn't get a fair trial as he was unable to obtain proper representation.

Failing the above, he will be out in 2 years, far better than being extradited to the US.


The private prosecution is a feature of UK law that can sometimes be useful where the state deems the expense of prosecution too much given the nature of the evidence or offence. In effect, the state finds someone innocent without the evidence being tested in court. The unfairness here is that a very wealthy organisation can afford to throw money at even the most dubious cases, hoping a few will stick. The private prosecution option was so that individuals who felt strongly enough could at least get the evidence tried in court, rather than see someone escape scot free on what might be a technicality.

If the cases, and others like it, get overturned on appeal, it could get very expensive for FACT, and cause a change in the law to stop them simply throwing money at flimsy cases as some kind of "terrorism" of ordinary citizens.

The site hosting no videos is really a technical dodge, so it is not a complete surprise that a jury felt this way, rather than letting him off scot free for his technical approach.

We don't have a formal "fair use" law in the UK, but cases like this could lead to one, and this might not be something FACT would want.

However, in the US, the constitutional right to free speech makes actions for libel hard to prosecute, so one could say so much more about FACT over there, whereas over here FACT could use libel law to shut down similar adverse comment and opinion.
 

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