"Cleveland police have extended the bail granted to the former administrator of an alleged music piracy site for a second time, in a bid to collect more evidence for a case that could mark a watershed for UK internet law.
Alan Ellis, a 24-year-old IT worker from Middlesbrough, was arrested in October on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement offences, over his site OiNK's Pink Palace.
A police spokeswoman said today that he had been briefly reinterviewed today for clarifications and granted police bail to reappear on May 6. The extension has been sought to allow more time for computer forensics, she said...
Since his arrest, Ellis has publicly argued that OiNK merely provided a Google-like indexing service, and cannot be held accountable for the actual music files that the trackers poined to. It's the same defence that's set to be used by the administrators of the Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay in their upcoming trial.
If a copyright prosecution is ever brought against Ellis, it would be a test case for a 2003 amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act that states a criminal offence may be committed by a person who "distributes otherwise than in the course of a business so as to affect prejudicially the honour or reputation of the author or director"."
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