FOIA requests are a helpful tool for journalists and at TorrentFreak we previously used this right to uncover the scope of City of London Police’s anti-piracy efforts.

There is more to reveal though. It is widely known that the police work in tandem with entertainment industry groups such as FACT and the BPI, so we also attempted to find out what’s being discussed behind closed doors.

Since asking for all information shared between City of London Police and entertainment industry groups might be a bit much, we focused our FOIA request on The Pirate Bay.

More specifically, we requested police correspondence with representatives of the creative industry “regarding the pirate bay also known as TPB, thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.sx, thepiratebay.org, or Pirate Bay.”

On Friday we heard back from the responsible Information Access Officer, but no documents were provided. Instead, we were told that the request can’t be processed as the cost would exceed the statutory limit of £450.

“In order to establish the existence of any correspondence of this kind it would be necessary to examine all mail systems, all call logs and all files/documents held by the force,” the reply read.

“The cost of completing this work would exceed the limit prescribed by the Secretary of State in accordance with powers contained in Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. The limit is currently set at £450 and the hourly rate is set at £25.”

Apparently the police estimate that it would take more than 18 hours to locate the information we asked for. That would make sense if none of the documents are organized, but we assume that the force has some type of archiving system.

The above response leaves us with no other option than to limit the request to electronic information only, specifying a narrow time frame. Whether this will fall within the desired cost projection has yet to be seen though. Let’s hope there’s no hard drive crash in the meantime.

To be continued…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In a letter sent to the domain registrars of several torrent and MP3-related sites, police stated that the domains in question (including ExtraTorrent.com, SumoTorrent.com, emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com) were being run by criminals who were breaking UK law. Therefore the domains should be suspended within 48 hours, the police explained.

One registrar, PDR Ltd, immediately complied with the request, even though the police had not obtained a court order compelling them to do so. Another, EasyDNS, refused to comply on the basis that there needed to be due process. This led to an attempt by the owner of the latter three sites listed above to transfer his domains to EasyDNS as he believed the registrar would stand up for his rights.

However, PDR Ltd refused to transfer the domains over, prompting EasyDNS to embark on a crusade to force PDR Ltd to accept that while seizing domains with a court order might be acceptable, doing so simply because someone asks you to is not, even when that someone is the police.

EasyDNS took the matter to Verisign (who issued a decision of “No Decision”) and eventually all the way to the National Arbitration Forum. Yesterday the ICANN Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy panel handed down its decision and it was good news for EasyDNS, the sites in question, plus any others that may face future domain seizures that are not backed by court orders.

“Although there are compelling reasons why the request from a recognized law enforcement agency such as the City of London Police should be honored, the Transfer Policy is unambiguous in requiring a court order before a Registrar of Record may deny a request to transfer a domain name,” the panel wrote in its decision.

“To permit a registrar of record to withhold the transfer of a domain based on the suspicion of a law enforcement agency, without the intervention of a judicial body, opens the possibility for abuse by agencies far less reputable than the City of London Police.”

Concluding, the panel found that PDR Ltd had violated the policy on domain transfers and ordered the registrar to transfer emp3world.com, full-albums.net and maxalbums.com to EasyDNS.

“This is a big victory for all domain holders because it upholds their right to ‘vote with their feet’ in response to unreasonable takedown of their domain names,” EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic tells TorrentFreak.

“We expect all modern democracies to accord a legal process against parties accused of something, something that has been conspicuous in its absence from the London Police requests, which encouraged registrars to summarily shutdown domain names and then go so far as to hijack their traffic to competing interests.”

The question now is whether the police or the BPI / FACT will choose to step away from domain seizures or try a fresh approach with the backing of the courts.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.