I was reading this on the BBC site recently and the thought occurred to me that this is a private police force and despite the name a force not run by the UK home office directly, a distinction most folks in the UK are not aware of let alone any of the ISP's who are send inept messages with false claims of copyright piracy by this bunch of
private "police". TechDirt seems to have had the same thoughts
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141023/05355028918/city-london-police-fail-censor-their-way-to-lot-more-uk-taxpayer-money.shtmlWe've written plenty about the City of London Police and its Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), which despite an official jurisdiction covering a square mile of London, has made it clear that it considers itself Hollywood's private police force worldwide when it comes to stopping copyright infringement online.
The head of the unit, Adrian Leppard, claims that "the Tor" is "90% of the internet" and "is a risk to society." Another top officer, Andy Fyfe, somehow believes that if PIPCU isn't running around censoring sites there would be anarchy online.
Of course, it's not just crazy statements and bogus threats. PIPCU is actually causing real damage. It has built a secret pirate blacklist over which there is no transparency, no due process and no appeal.
Instead, the UK government has just given PIPCU a raise, dumping £3 million of UK taxpayer money into the group to continue its bumbling, censoring, technologically clueless ways. While I'm sure this makes some increasingly obsolete gatekeepers happy, it's hard to see how this helps content creators or the public in any way at all.
It seems once again that the people picking up the tab for the so called "creative industries" are the poor tax payers, no chance of anyone involved in copyright enforcement actually putting their hand in their own pocket, they religiously prefer to put that hand in yours.
We wont ask about all the tax fiddles celebrities have been caught up in this year either as most of them have wisely decided to pay back the fiddled tax rather than face publicity, some however wanted to brazen it out ..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/11071478/Gary-Barlow-apologises-for-tax-row-and-will-settle-things.htmlIts a shame the rest of the populace do not have the luxury of "sorting things out with the tax man" they have their tax taken each week from their wages, seems one rule for the rich and one for the poor.
