Police Arrest Men for Spreading Popcorn Time Information

At the risk of making a slippery slope argument, it's impossible not to wonder how this boundary will continue to move (how many degrees of separation can be prosecuted from an actual crime). I'm sure the more extreme advocates of this prosecution will try to draw parallels to "What if someone put a bomb making guide online"; but this illustrates the point well: When the original feinstein bill to make illegal distributing bomb making information was put into place, it was not long after that corporate interests wanted to move the needle such that financial damages were protected in similar form, in this case from CD cracking.

We've now moved one step further, pursuing those helping people find ways to help them do an illegal act (my own opinions aside, it's still illegal), and while this can be very readily justified as simply expanding the scope of investigation for involved parties, I have two primary concerns.

- One, where do you draw the line? As a sister post jokingly put it, google should clearly be taken down for facilitation too. But perhaps it's not such an outlandish suggestion after all?

- Two, there are too many similarities in my mind to how prosecution in the drug war focused on end users, and the overwhelmingly negative outcome from that angle of attack; With the additional leveraging of some of the most extreme violations that can be brought against these individuals (as another sister post jokingly puts it, "those terrorists!"), I must again take the sobering reality from that joke in that we are further criminalizing acts that at the end of the day have EXTREMELY disputable damaging impact, and for practical purposes, entirely overturning the subjects lives (who, I have no reason to believe were not otherwise productive citizens; but no longer) in the pursuit of this crusade.

That was quite the rant. A bit of a conglomeration of a few subjects very close to heart, I guess.

Let me try and end this with a thought, however, more to the tune of what HackerNews wants to be:

Given that the pre-takedown content of the site is still present on Archive.org, I wonder how much of a statement it would be to start mirroring the content in a more "disposible" fashion across multiple providers, play a game of whack-a-mole. Or if something like Etherium, or another distributed system, is truly the panacea for content like this. It probably takes away from my earlier points in that I would support this form of dissent, but I can't help but see things like that and not want to "aim to misbehave."

So now people are getting arrested for writing about and linking to a software that helps people potentially infringe copyright. Plus their domains seized and website shut down before they have been found guilty of anything.

Shoot first and ask later. True Hollywood style.

Luckily Torrentfreak is not based in Denmark.

  “The Danish State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime is presently conducting a criminal investigation that involves this domain name,”

Wow so this is treated as a serious economic or international crime. Those terrorists!