Police Chief Faces High Court Anti-Piracy Action
Written by enigmax on June 12, 2008After the police arrest citizens for minor copyright infringements that allegedly took place on OiNK, they now face their own anti-piracy woes. Chief Constable Steve Finnigan is accused by the music industry of copyright infringement and now faces High Court action. Police pirates - who would have imagined it?
When it comes to copyright, we live in a strange world of double-standards. One minute a minor copyright infringer will be ignored or tolerated, the next thing we know - such as in the recent OiNK arrests - those same civil law infringements are inflated to become some sort of next-level serious cyber-crime.
A few days later, and those same offenses are now just worthy of a simple warning - confusing times.
Today, the strange world of copyright has the music industry threatening those it has encouraged to work for them in the OiNK case - the police.
UK music licensing outfit the “Performing Right Society” (PRS) - the guys that come asking for money when you play any music within earshot of the public - is rolling out the big guns ready for a High Court showdown with a little known group of music pirates, known in the UK as ‘the police’. Not the band of the same name, but that government organization people rely on for keeping law and order.
According to a report, the police in the county of Lancashire have apparently committed a terrible crime and let the whole country down. Rather like the copyright infringing tea-rooms and their carol-singing occupants we wrote about last year, it appears that the police have been recklessly listening to music in stations all over the county - without a license. The PRS aren’t happy.
Chief Constable Steve Finnigan is the guy being held accountable for this awful breach of copyright across 34 police stations in his county. One shudders to think of the damage that these boys-in-blue have caused the industry, as they coincidentally listen to the radio at the same time as serving the citizens of Britain. But it doesn’t stop there - according to a High Court writ, unlicensed music has also been played in police gyms, conferences, presentations and office parties.
As if things aren’t bad enough, there are worrying claims that telephone callers to police stations were put on hold and forced to listen to unlicensed music while they waited to report crimes. The trauma of ‘holding music’ is bad enough, but throw ‘unlicensed’ holding music into the mix and the gravity of this infringement is obvious.
The PRS is looking to get an injunction against the force and if it’s successful it will silence music in police stations right across the county, unless they dig deep for the appropriate license. The PRS is also sensitively and sensibly claiming damages from the already under-funded police.
It seems that further police forces in the UK have informed the PRS that music is often played in the background in their offices, with eleven of them either failing or refusing to obtain licenses enabling them to listen to it legally.
Generally, the PRS make a request for information from people who they believe should be paying them money, usually by letter. The recipient is then expected to tell them all about their music-playing antics and after this is complete, the PRS calculate and then send out a bill. Interestingly, it’s claimed that the head of legal services at Lancashire police told the PRS that she had instructed her colleagues to ignore the requests for information. She then emailed the PRS and said she had instructions to accept the service of proceedings against the force.
The PRS legal eagles believe that Steve Finnigan is admitting the claims, which could mean that the UK will shortly have its first Pirate Chief Constable. Let’s hope his associates at Cleveland Police don’t get involved - the last thing the police boss needs is to be arrested on conspiracy to defraud the music industry.
Previously: BitTorrent Trio Hit a Billion Pageviews a Month
Next: Canada Proposes Draconian Anti-Piracy Law
74 Responses
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this is so pathetic.
you are not even allowed to listen to your music as you want.
soon you will be fined for letting anyone but the purchaser of the cd listen to the music
LOL!
HILARIOUS!
“As if things aren’t bad enough, there are worrying claims that telephone callers to police stations were put on hold and forced to listen to unlicensed music while they waited to report crimes. The trauma of ‘holding music’ is bad enough, but throw ‘unlicensed’ holding music into the mix and the gravity of this infringement is obvious.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The British police should be purged!
All listening to unlicenced music should be shot and quartered!!
How dare they?!
The world is going mad.. Or should I say more so than it already is.
Sigh..
String ‘em up!
this is truly getting worse by the day. this is the biggest joke after the defraud news. what are they going to do next? sue me for listening the radio over the internet? just as i thought those people couldnt go any lower
Is anyone here at all surprised? I am most certanly not.
A question that might arise could be, as many allready must have thought about one time or another I imagine, how many stores, elevators, politicians offices and government buildings does not allready play unlicenced music? What about hospitals and kindergarden?
How many policemens and politicians sons and daughters download and play music, movies and what not?
I get so terribly tired sometimes.
skin those little piggies alive!
Man whats up with the children these day?
ACAB… =]
i was told recently and this may or may not be true but apparently, if you have more than 4 people round to watch a dvd then it is classed as a public performance and you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Where i can get that shit they are smoking?
I’m having a BBQ this weekend and will have music playing out in the garden …better watch out for the legal eagles i might end up in court for playing my own music i have paid for …just cos the neigbours can hear it also …what a fucking joke…Britain is getting worse..
Guys, guys! Wait for a minute and just dont start flaming the morons… this actually be a good thing for us.
However much we may dislike the cops i think I speak for all of us when I saw we dislike the “copyright cops” more… infact we would like to see more “copyright corpse”, you gotto remember evern though they sometimes dont act like it… the UK police are humans too.. given their cash crunch and these absurd charges its only a matter of time before they rebel themselves to screw over this gangster industry and we gain an ally!
I hope they really go after this cop, make an example of him… something that is sure to come back and bite them on the ass a little later.
cheers!
http://www.ezee.se/
@ the.dwarfer
A public performance is as stated in section 101 of the copyright law that a performance is public if it is in a public place or if it is in any place if “a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its acquaintances” is gathered there.
Then again, the sly lawyers might as well bend this to there favor similar to the “making available” idea they have somehow been able to keep up…
section 101 ? section lol !
@15
Never has the term “lol” been more appropriate :D
anouther win for the record companies! lets hope they make an example out of this corrupted piracy ring leader who managed to worm his way into the police force in order to bring things down from the inside!
@14 some families like mine have an astonishing amount of relatives, and i dont mean distant relatives i mean my grandparents had 13 kids and most of them have had kids who have had kids ya we couldnt all fit in a movie theatre if we wanted to but watching on the back of my house with a projector while jamming in my pool accomadates us quite nicely. lol
If this is the way its going to be then we’ll soon see the cops on our side.
^^ true, and hopefully they will now see how stupid they copyright lobby is….
I laughed so hard my stomach hurts.
Now sincerely, i pitty all the normal people who live in the UK.
That country is going to HELL… Haven’t you guyz seen V for Vendetta?, that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you ppl don’t do something about it…
LOL! My head hurts
HILARIOUS! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
*sigh*
This actually is to our favor, I mean if I was a cop, if they ever needed my help for say a robbing or someone taking a dump in their chimney, I’d tell them the closest guy is tied up for a moment and will be there in 15-25 minutes.
But you better watch out, soon if you’re playing music you created without a label in public, you’ll get fined for breaking your own copyright.
the police will not become an ‘ally’…that is so far-fetched…. These are the same police that harass you at the slightest cause or provocation and who punish normal citizenry as much and as frequently as possible. They believe all the rhetoric and their own causes
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