When police forces are claiming they don’t have enough officers to investigate murder cases, does it really make sense to commit police time to locking up not-for-profit warezmongers?

There are two sane answers. One is "no, of course it doesn’t, what the fuck is going on? Who gives a monkey’s if a few nerds get the next version of Windows before it’s released". The other is "no, of course it doesn’t, but software piracy is a serious problem, so we should fund the coppers enough to deal with both". The latter is a reasonable view – but even so, based on current resources, there is no excuse for the police wasting their time on the latter sort of case.

(to be fair, one of the warezmongers apparently used his job to supply customers’ credit card numbers to buy software with, which is thoroughly scummy behaviour and should be punished just as severely as any other ID theft. However, most of them didn’t.)

My perspective is that the police should investigate only crimes against individuals. Companies should be free to carry out their own investigations against individuals and competitors who attempt to copy (or defraud, or blackmail) them, including obtaining warrants to disclose secret information based on reasonable suspicion as the police currently do. They should, however, have to do this at their own cost.

Not only is the current IP regime a nonsensical piece of corporate welfare in itself, IP enforcement is a nonsense. I resent the use of my tax money to track down people who are beneficial in strict economic terms (once a piece of IP exists, the most economically efficient outcome is to distribute it as widely as possible), who are only questionably harmful in any terms (the greatest advances in human invention came before the implementation of rigorous IP and patent law, and the idea that domestic use of pirated business software damages companies’ bottom lines appreciably is laughable), and who *certainly* only harm corporations who can afford to do the tracking-down themselves.