The City of London’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has asked domain-name registrars to suspend 317 pirate sites in the last two years, according to TorrentFreak. The site used a Freedom Of Information (FOI) request to get the figures, which also reveal that PIPCU has written to the operators of 377 sites with warning letters since it was founded.
What’s missing from the stats, however, is any indication of how many of the 317 suspension requests were accepted. TorrentFreak claims that this time last year, PIPCU had sent out 75 such requests but only five of them had been successful, and quotes the boss of domain-registrar EasyDNS scoffing at the idea: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to ‘some guy on the internet’ sending emails,” says Mark Jeftovic. Because the police are just some guys on the internet, right?
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