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Comment by wait_a_minute | Hacker News Reader

Illegal…streams? Why does the UK have police monitoring what streams people watch? That’s not good. UK wants thought police?

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In many countries the police address complaints of illegal streaming from copyright holders reporting individual IP addresses accessing torrents they are sitting on. Why on earth would the UK have a policy that the Police's time could be spent actively detecting that activity. Like how is that ever a priority?

I am glad I left the UK long ago. When I go back I see cameras literally everywhere. Going on the motorway is insane, indeed any given road is peppered with speed cameras, but the motorway has taken it to the max.

It's well known that an individual can be tracked pretty much across the country on various CCTV. While this is great for crime detection it does have a social morale cost that is not considered as they quietly descend unimpeded into 1984.

Anyone see the debacle of the piano player being gaslit by a police officer dealing with Chinese people complaining he was filming them in public?

Yes, the UK wants thought police. They're slightly ahead of the other Western nations.

Apparently some UK police even think that "this isn't Communist China" is hate speech, an illegal utterance. They're wrong of course, but that won't stop them from trying to make trouble for you.

Even if they're wrong they can write you up for a "non-crime hate incident". You won't go to jail, but good luck finding employment as that shows up on background checks.

That’s kind of the point of the article… they aren’t.

I think what OP is saying is that it’s a bit crazy they’re asking the question in the first place. What is an “illegal stream” and why are we even talking about it in the first place? This shouldn’t even be something the police have control over at all.

Copyright violations are the distribution side, not the consumption side to my knowledge, those PPV Boxing streams don't get the viewers sued they get the distributors sued.

pretty sure you’re right — but from the article

> A key component of an ongoing anti-piracy campaign in the UK includes sensitizing the public to the risk of being convicted for fraud offenses carrying prison sentences of up to 10 years. Not for getting involved in the supply or sale of pirate streams, but for simply watching them.

Pretty sure the premise of the article is to discredit “scare tactics” being used to claim otherwise by interested parties.

I’m a big fan of copyright. Not a big fan of scaremongering.

I'm a big fan of copyright, but the length is ridiculous.

For a live cultural events it should be 1 year max. 99% of the value of Man U vs Arsenal is in the first 24 hours, before the result is known.

As mentioned in the article, in the UK it is nominally a crime to watch a pirate stream in order to avoid paying for the paid version of the stream. The relevant law is [1]. It is also illegal to distribute such a stream. Such streams are referred to as “illegal streams.”

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/notes/division/...

This is the country where you need a license to watch live broadcast TV. They have some experience policing video.

(Regarding torrents, perhaps the most popular pirating medium...) In general, torrent users are consumers and distributors. Technically you can disable seeding, but peers can detect this and many will stop sharing with you.

You are not copying a stream

The law says what it says, without regard for your semantics.

The law says that downloading for free is not a crime and judges abide by this law and no citizen has gone to prison. So I download

They probably aren't actively monitoring it. However, if they bust a provider of illegal streams, they can just take their access logs and/or payment information to identify watchers.

They have police monitoring private Snapchat conversations

I think many governments do this for reasons other than piracy. Human trafficking, child abuse, and a myriad of scams, hate groups, etc.

Often it is illegal streams in pubs etc that are "monitored" (I.e. someone from a rights holder goes in and checks the watermarks on the screen). So not someone in their house, but a pub or bar streaming something that people want to watch without paying the normal fees.

Seriously? Do they do the same for places playing music? I thought the copyright holders pursued these offences, I just can't imagine a cop doing a patrol popping into pubs and bars and checking for streaming.

In the US it happens all the time that DirecTV hires PI's to check if bars are broadcasting sports (or music) without a license.

So not cops then. That's exactly what I was saying, the copyright owners usually chase this stuff, not the police. I just can't imagine uniform ever doing this sort of thing.

If you're curious, you should look up the story (I saw on HN years ago) about an apple R&D engineer leaving a next-gen iPhone prototype at a bar. Some guy found it and took it home and Apple got almost a SWAT team level response from the police to get it back. Also, the programmer who quit Goldman Sachs and they got the FBI to arrest and hold him for (IIRC) a whole year before he cleared his name. Allegedly he copied the entire trading system software to his personal drive, (and he did start his own HFT company) but his side was that people copied company code outside the network all the time and this was routine, and none of GS' code was found on his new company's server.

Big difference between a company verifying its own product distribution vs law enforcement being tasked with that. Not to mention that the concept of being fined or jailed for this is absolutely ridiculous.

They are already the thought police. Try standing silently praying (not that anyone could tell from looking at you) near an abortion clinic.

Oi m8, you got a loicence for that?

Now then, now then, what are we watchin’ ‘ere then?

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