U.K. MAN SENTENCED TO 4 YEARS FOR “FACILITATING” PIRACY

The owner of a British website that allegedly “facilitated” copyright infringement has been sentenced to four years in prison after a private anti-piracy group collected an enormous dossier of evidence about his activities and his private life, including detailed information about his wife and family, according to TorrentFreak.com. Before being sentenced, Anton Vickerman, who ran a site called SurfTheChannel, which allegedly posted links to BitTorrent sites offering pirated copies of U.S. television shows, displayed on the website the documents that he had presumably obtained through the discovery process that the MPAA-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft had been used to make the case against him. They included notes about his wife, including the make, model and license of her car; detailed information about his bank accounts, including his mortgage loan; and details about the finances of his mother and father. Commented TorrentFreak: “The data and correspondence collated runs to dozens of pages but perhaps what is most noticeable is the manner in which everything is presented. The whole thing looks like a police operation yet it was not — it was an investigation being carried out by a U.K. company on behalf of other companies in the United States.”