[governance] FW: [IP] Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

Sun Aug 19 01:29:11 EDT 2012

It appears that the globalization of the mechanisms of "governance" has
already happened but it is Mickey Mouse err... the US copyright industry
which has managed the feat and one can be assured that the result will be
little truck or trade re: supporting "the public interest". 

M

From: Dave Farber [mailto:dave at farber.net] 
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:58 AM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dewayne Hendricks 
Date: Saturday, August 18, 2012
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit
behind bars
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net at warpspeed.com>

Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars
Industry-funded prosecution leads to 4-year sentence for SurfTheChannel
owner.
By Timothy B. Lee
Aug 16 2012
<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/private-justice-how-hollywood-mo
ney-put-a-brit-behind-bars/>

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 hired by FACT first
identified Vickerman as the administrator of STC and built the case against
him. His assets were frozen at FACT's request by a government agency-which
was itself funded by FACT. And when the UK's public prosecutors decided not
to press charges against Vickerman at all, FACT initiated a criminal
prosecution on its own dime.

This is a new development for anti-piracy efforts. Organizations like the
MPAA, RIAA, IFPA, and FACT have long lobbied law enforcement officials to
prosecute "rogue sites" and have provided them with information and
logistical support to do so. But public prosecutors generally have the final
say on who will be indicted. In the Vickerman case, the public prosecutors
concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to merit prosecution. FACT
disagreed and invoked what one lawyer told us is an "archaic right" for a
private organization to bring criminal prosecutions against other private
parties.

Vickerman posted a lengthy testimonial to his site after he was convicted.
In it, he describes FACT as a lawless conspiracy to shut down his site for
the benefit of competing video sites, and he portrays Judge Evans as an
"imbecile" who didn't understand the legal issues in the case. While many of
the accusations seem overwrought, Vickerman did include a cache of documents
that came out during his trial. From them we can paint a clear picture of
just how far one private party was allowed to go in its bid for justice.

FACT confirmed the authenticity of the court documents for us but declined
to get into the specifics of Vickerman's account-arguing that his conviction
by a jury of his peers speaks for itself.

[snip]

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