It's smiley emoticons all around over at Filesoup, following the news that United Kingdom police have withdrawn all criminal charges for copyright infringement against the Bristol based BitTorrent file sharing site.

Crown Prosecution Service attorneys have finally conceded before a judge that it was "neither necessary nor appropriate to continue to pursue the matter in a criminal court." Founded in 2003, Filesoup is, as its banner page notes, "the first and foremost BitTorrent community on the Web."

"Nice to hear guys congrats," one Filesoup fan cheers on a forum page. "Been a long stressful time coming but glad to hear the good news."

"I just want to express my happiness here on forum ... " another declares. "I was so glad to hear that you guys are now FINALLY FREE!" But, "I still cannot believe how can the European sovereign country jump as a puppy for some 'Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT)' against its own citizens."

Confronting threats

Jump the UK did—based on accusations made by FACT, the big content backed force behind Britain's Metropolitan Police Piracy Unit. Founded in 2006 with a staff of five detectives, MPPU was supposed to boost FACT's "capacity to address and confront the threats from the organised networks which are making significant profits from film piracy," the Federation crowed at the time.

In the summer of 2009 Filesoup's Steven Lanning, aka "Geeker," and his colleague George Cartledge, "Snookered," were brought into police headquarters for allegedly breaking the UK's Copyright, Design, and Patents Act. DVDs and computers were seized. Lanning was warned to stay in touch with the cops or face immediate arrest. Eventually authorities charged both admins with conspiracy to infringe copyright—exhibit A being alleged shares of the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

But on Thursday, police lawyers at Bristol Crown Court admitted that this was, if anything, a civil case. "The Crown Prosecution Service advised the Court today that it is neither necessary nor appropriate to continue to pursue this matter in a criminal court," a CPS spokesperson declared.

Unanswered questions

Filesoup's victory follows the January acquittal of Alan Ellis, proprietor of OiNK, a UK online music sharing service. The jury agreed with Ellis' attorneys that OiNK was essentially a Google-like search service for file sharers, often used by musicians to promote their latest tunes.

In the Filesoup prosecution, the matter didn't get that far. It's no surprise to us that UK police eventually got cold feet in pushing this issue as a criminal matter. The criminal liability enforcement provisions of the Copyright and Patents Act are kind of soupy themselves when it comes to community-based file sharing sites. Are venues like Filesoup even covered by them?

For example, the law makes it clear that an "offence" under the act is triggered when a person, "without the licence of the copyright owner . . . makes for sale or hire, or . . . sells or lets for hire, or . . . possesses in the course of a business . . . an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work."

The law also criminalizes the importation of such a item into the UK, but only when "otherwise than for his private and domestic use." There is an "otherwise than in the course of a business" clause, but only "to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright."

So is Filesoup selling or hiring anything? Is it even a business? Beyond a single Google banner ad, there doesn't seem to be much commerciality to the site.

As the Torrentfreak blog observes, the prosecution "failed to understand some of the technical issues, did not know whether to prosecute FileSoup as a business or not, and was unsure whether the copyright holder had caused prejudice. Since there was no independent investigation into the case, all these questions remained unanswered."

Hopefully hot air

No surprise then that there's a triumphal mood over at Filesoup right now.

"Great news about the case being dropped," yet another Filesouper declares. "This is hopefully the start of the end for FACT. Breath[e] deeply lads, do you smell that? Can you? that is the smell of freedom and victory breath[e] deeply with light hearts."

But the UK Telegraph cites police saying that FACT can still push this matter in civil court, "and that the force would support such action." The anti-copyright infringement group "declined to comment" on what it plans to do next, the newspaper added.

"Lets hope that they just are full of hot air about that part.... " a more worried Filesoup supporter comments.