When Telecom Companies Search Your Home for Piracy

&gt; ... and his use of a web service that hides a site’s hosting provider (Lackman says it was the immensely popular service Cloudflare), meant that there was a real risk that Lackman might destroy evidence if they didn’t conduct a surprise search.<p>TIL Cloudflare makes you suspicious in the eyes of the law. Lawyers are truly great humans. &#x2F;s

I find it weird that they just took down the site and took over the twitter account during a search. Nothing has been ruled illegal. It’s like if someone sued Google and decided to take the search engine down during the initial search for illegal material. How is this legal? And even if the site is deemed illegal, how does that allow them to hijack his twitter account?

I&#x27;m more and more concerned about shit like this. I&#x27;m not doing anything illegal now, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to stop companies from destroying your entire life if they even think you have done something illegal.<p>I feel like if I&#x27;d have to have anything that could be seen as remotely shifty behind additional encryption layers, preferably with a way to destroy the records completely at a distance.

I don&#x27;t understand why searches can be done by private parties, with no police present. This seems extremely wrong to me. How can this be?

The concept of intellectual property was invented to further certain economic goals. It provides a social good. There is no doubt about that but it has a drastically shorter history than the concept of physical property (which predates written records to my knowledge)<p>The legal system has evolved many safeguards over the years related to improper search, self-incrimination and due process.<p>I find it curious how easily the latter is sacrificed in favour of the former without anyone suggesting we need to continually reevaluate the degree that the former provides us benefit.<p>I think this is partly a language problem. Intellectual &quot;Property&quot; has now become merely Intellectual Property without the quotes. This sleight of hand has led many to forget it&#x27;s origin&#x27;s and contingent nature and to treat it as some kind of natural right rather than a concession from the state to further commerce and creativity.

Media companies behave like warlords claiming an absolute monopoly on media content distribution and treating accordingly anyone they might perceive as competition.

So according to the article you don&#x27;t have to let them in to search your residence (although you may be held in contempt) but these fine individuals turned up with a locksmith?<p>IANAL but sounds like a case of bad faith if I&#x27;ve ever heard it. Should&#x27;ve forced them to use the locksmith and then had the cops charge them with burglary.

&gt; Deep-pocketed companies, on the other hand, “not only have the resources to pursue [perceived harms] to the point where individuals don’t have the ability to defend themselves, but also to advance mechanisms with fewer safeguards,” Israel said.<p>Does anyone else feel this shouldn&#x27;t be the case? Clearly, the amount of money in your pockets shouldn&#x27;t decide the quality of legal representation. We need to evaluate alternate proposals that fixes these gaps.

He was smart for calling a lawyer during the search, but he committed a major error by providing login credentials for his machines. Yikes.

That is just awful...and all this time i thought Canada was a far freer (as in liberty) place to live. Huh.

I wonder if there&#x27;s a Linux package that can wipe your server&#x2F; computer when you input a specific code when logging in?

&gt; <i>“I never saw this as hurting [rights holders],” Lackman told me. “People run sites that link to content—torrent sites. Those are the people who are stealing the movies.”</i><p>typical feigned naivete

How come pirates making decent money with sites like this always seem to be woefully unprepared for any sort of legal action being taken against them?

They meet my 2 Rottweilers and my German Shepard?

Canada is NOT a democracy, is a &quot;protectorate&quot; of UK crown, so do not be surprised. Canadians are NOT citizen, they are, formally, subjects of her majesty the queen.<p>In continental Europe such an action is simply illegal: only officers can enter a home, only with justice permission or for danger-life situation. Also any IT device can&#x27;t be sized looking for digital proof, they must be imaged locally with image given to the defendant with relative hashes and a proper chain of custody. Of course sometime police forgot doing that and in MANY cases any proof became simply invalid in court.<p>Dear &quot;citizens&quot; freedom does not came from &quot;ether&quot; and stay forever, must be conquered and kept. Business as usual and classic Chomsky frog principle are the best weapon few people have to shift between representative government to corporatocracy.

I know we are supposed to be all up in arms about his rights and certainly that is a big issue, but at the same time... he was running a questionable &#x2F; edgy website... &quot;he took a laissez-faire approach to policing which addons made it onto his site.&quot;<p>At some level, given the history of previous issues like this, what did he expect?

In my humble opinion, this guy deserved what happened to him, which was justified in its entirety.<p>He was an enabler of technologies that allowed sharing of information for enjoying content without permission from authors of said content.<p>Also, in my humble opinion, this should cover anyone that provides links, including search engines.<p>Furthermore, again in my humble opinion, copyrights should be permanent, and I really see no reason why someone should stop enjoying the success of their creation as long as their creation is popular. If there is demand for something, why shall it not produce profit?