You can view the page at http://filesharingtalk.com/content/2...ers-45-347-USD
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You can view the page at http://filesharingtalk.com/content/2...ers-45-347-USD
what a good site it was:(
£29,000 wouldn't even cover the cost of one CID officer for one year. Remember that this case has been ongoing for three or four years, prior to and after the shutdown of OiNK. Don't forget the additional burden of cost in utilising the Dutch police to raid the server farm and confiscate the OiNK servers. Don't forget the loss of revenue from all the other businesses affected by the raid on the server farm, and their compensation.
In fact, police man hours would be rigorously documented simply because they would need to demonstrate to a court how their time was spent investigating a case. Then you have the legal team. Barristers cost £400 upwards an hour, and the CPS would need to utilise quite a few to process this case. Then there is the cost of taking the case to court. I should imagine that the cost to the UK taxpayer would be in the region of £500,000 or more. Of course, no one would want to admit that they spent £500,000 on a case that they took to court and lost, hence the low figure of £27,000.
Of course, police officers are employed regardless, so the Home Office might try to bury the cost within this framework, but then we have to realise that if these officers weren't investigating OiNK and Allan Ellis, then they would have been concentrating on other, more serious, crimes. Police only have a finite resource, so time spent investigating the OiNK case means that other cases would have had less resources applied to them. I wonder if someone somewhere has got away with a crime, because coppers were concentrating on OiNK and Ellis?