I think it's incredibly depressing the police are being drawn increasingly into this sort of thing. Tackling copyright infringement is one thing. Fucking about wasting police time for financial gain is quite another.
It's just that they are doing something, but they're something wrong. Police shouldn't go after little boys and girls, most of whom have no idea what copyright means. If the authorities want to tackle piracy, they have to go to the core of the problem and arrest the owners of the tracker systems that allow bittorrent based file sharing. I don't see how you can win a war against 20 to 50 thousand 14-yearolds who want to play the lates PC game without having to save their allowings for a month or two.
Today I had to write an article about the bittorrent sites in Bulgaria and the world practices of arresting torrent peers and seeders. Do you know what I found out? There's only one miserable fellow, who got arrested for peering, and he was in Hong Kong - where you can potentionally be arrested for spitting on the street. All the other cases that I studied for my article involved arrests of individuals who are responsible for torrent tracking sites, except for this guy in Rotchester, who was arrested for using torrents, but on the grounds that he used a "hacking program" on a campus based computer.