Anti-piracy Zealots Go Overboard

Lately, we've seen several disturbing examples of anti-piracy campaigns run amok and its time for content owners to stop fighting the Internet and start embracing it completely. The problem is, the owners are trying to protect their content beyond reason, and it only gets worse when industry groups get the government involved to be their mouthpiece....

It got even worse for a British man, Anton Vickerman, who ran a website that linked to a variety of streaming media sites. He didn't merely have to deal with the burden of takedown notices though. Instead, he might have to go to prison. In spite of the fact that he didn't display any content on his site, he was recently sentenced to four years in prison. What's interesting is that they didn't even prosecute him under anti-piracy statutes, but instead for "conspiracy to defraud," probably because they couldn't get him for piracy when his site didn't have any content on it.

And as Ars Technica reports, it was a case of British prosecutors working hand-in-glove with a movie studio trade group called the Federation Against Copyright Theft. The article claims, in fact, that it was FACT that built the case against Vickerman, going so far as to hire private investigators, building a case against him and then getting the British government to freeze Vickerman's assets...