UK Pirate Site Operator Ignores Police Threats

The UK police keep targeting Internet piracy on multiple fronts – the dedicated unit puts pressure on advertisers and hosting companies and contacts website operators directly, urging them to shut down or go legit. However, some site owners ignore this enforcement action.

The UK police approach hosting services, advertisers and payment processors, urging the companies to stop their cooperation with infringing websites. Besides, pirate site owners received warning letters, where they were asked to go legit or cease to exist.

For example, one of the targeted sites is DNJ.to (DailyNewJams). It is a music portal whose users can stream and download music tracks. The service received a letter from the UK police, accusing it of facilitating copyright infringement and threatening with sentences of imprisonment and/or fines. The cyber police unit also clarified that it had criminal and civil powers to seize money, belongings and any property in connection with such offences.

The warning also references a recent ruling from the European Court of Justice, which says that knowingly linking to infringing content for profit is illegal. As such, the police suggest that DNJ.to is doing so with a profit motive and urge it to stop doing so, threatening the site owner with “further police action”, for example, steps to disrupt revenue made from advertisements and/or payment services and Internet infrastructure disruption.

However, DNJ.to has no direct ties with the United Kingdom, so the site operators decided to disregard the letter. They explained that they don’t even try to actively drive UK traffic to the blog. As for enforcement threats, they also fail to impress the infringers – although some advertising networks were indeed convinced to ban such websites, many others are still eager to take the traffic. There are also many webhosting providers ready to service such websites as long as they pay.

DNJ.to operators said they get advertising offers from ad networks almost every day, and they know many hosting providers who absolutely don’t care about the alleged “facilitation of copyright infringement”.

Well, in any case, the warning letters are not entirely useless, because some smaller sites would choose to fold after facing such strong language from the police.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.