Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Piracy Bureau of Sweden Planted Evidence
American Sweden writes "Concerning the bust
at the Swedish ISP Bahnhof on March 10, IDG Sweden is reporting that Bahnhof
has posted their findings of an internal inspection. It seems as if the Anti-Piracy
Buereau of Sweden and their infiltrator "Rouge" had a good deal of involvement in supporting the busted FTP server not only with hardware but with so called "warez" as well. The blog of Lars Backlund has a translated version of the interview conducted in the report of Bahnhof." P2PNet.net has a breakdown of the relevant details as well. From the article: "As it turns out, APB (or, rather, their hired informer) supplied the servers and uploaded copyrighted materials. So that's why they were so sure to find stuff, they put it there!"
I think an "OH SNAP!" is appropriate.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Oh, wait...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Man, it's always the innocent and blond that suffer.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
Keep this in mind the next time anyone suggests any kind of plan by which a government may keep escrow keys for other people's cryptographic systems...
Or the next time a government defends about imprisoning someone without a trial, or holding tribunal-style trials where the evidence presented judicial decisions are not subject to public scrutiny...
"so called warez" ?
C'mon, this is slashdot, we know our piracy stuff... :)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
It seems as if the Anti-Piracy Buereau of Sweden and their infiltrator "Rouge" had a good deal of involvement in supporting the busted FTP server not only with hardware but with so called "warez" as well.
"Rouge"?
"warez"?
CowboyNeal?!
"For Great Justice."
So, we're supposed to get angry at all anti-piracy groups now because this one planted evidence?
I mean, that's really the point of posting this. If GPL authors can go after GPL violaters, copyright owners can go after infringers.
So called "warez" ? "warez" did all this software come from? From Anti-Piracy Buereau of Sweden of course! What you pun?
>So that's why they were so sure to find stuff, they put it there!
Well, the fun part is that they actually did not find the stuff they were looking for (specified to the court), and IIRC, they didn't even find the servers they were looking for.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It also sounds like entrapment. "Hey, can we be in your scene?!? Here's some 133t zero day games!" sounds a lot like "Hey honey, you working? $50 if you show me a good time."
"As it turns out, APB (or, rather, their hired informer) supplied the servers and uploaded copyrighted materials. So that's why they were so sure to find stuff, they put it there!""
In other words, the pro-piracy groups has just found a new excuse. "I wasn't pirating. I WAS FRAMED!"
Damn people can't spell. Or he is purposely going by "rouge" but why would a guy do that? Maybe after so many years of going by the typo of "rogue" he just couldn't give it up... ha.
This might all be a misstatement. If you follow the link and download the logs, you see he had access for 2yrs and was uploading and downloading a lot of stuff. Now the question we should be asking is... how LONG was he an informant?
Meaning, maybe he was a kid busted for warez, and the police offered him a deal (no jail time in return for access to the server). So the end result may be that he was working for the police, but he wasn't in fact the police.
If that's the case, then I don't think the argument of planting evidence is going to work.
I used to work with a guy who had the worst command of English ever. What made this more perplexing was that it was his native tongue. Anyway, we developed a lexicon of terms that he couldn't pronounce.
Alias? "Uh lie us".
Executable? "Egg ZEK you table"
Egregious? "Eee gruh gare eee us" (like e-gregarious")
Anyway, his most..er.. egregious offense was when he came across the term "0day warez." We were at lunch talking about software or something else nerdy and he mentioned "Oday Juarez" (oh-day war ezz). I thought he was talking about an Iraqi-Mexican immigrant that had just started at work or something.
No. He read 0day warez as "Oday Juarez."
If I ever sign up for a Slashdot account, Oday Juarez is going to be my nick.
Really? The informer went by the name rouge ? That's pretty funny, and points out the hazards of trying to use a language in which you aren't native just because it sounds/looks cool. Kinda like those people who get random Chinese characters tattooed on them.
This seems to be a slightly different take on what we have been seeing in the US with the MPAA et al releasing fake materials onto p2p networks to frustrate pirates.
Here, they seem to be going after the providers of warez rather than the downloaders. This is the right idea - except for the sticky bit of planting the materials.
It seems to me that it would be worth the effort for copyright enforcers to work their way to the source of illegal goods without dirtying their own hands.
There are some good tests for fake pirates. Go ahead, ask if you can pound a foot-long spike through that "peg leg". And if there is really no eye behind that eyepatch, he won't mind a bit if you jab a pencil in the hole. Arrrr!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So some guy sets up a warez server in a computer lab. At least one of his friends that he has known for four years gets involved. For some reason, guy decides to busy his own warez server. Suspicious, yes. Worth investigating, certainly. Entrapment, probably not, unless it can be shown that he set up and maintained the server under the auspices of the legal authorities.
Burn Hollywood Burn
For the unenlightened few.
To be honest, I don't see why anyone is so worked up over this. Law enforcement has been "hiring" hitmen in order to find and arrest them for decades. (and no, I do not support antiP2P groups in any way at all).
Behold, another webcomic!
They're saying that the hired infiltrator had retrieved and shared the most part of all games and movies released during 2004. To gain more space for all copies, the infiltrator had even bought and sent hardware for a total of SEK 20,000 ($2,800). In the beginning of March, he was supposed to send hard drives totalling at 800 GB, however the raid came in between.
Even worse, this raid was part supported by STIM, an organization partially funded by the swedish government.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
In the US, the ISP could sue for damages, and there's a good chance the APB would settle for a large sum.
Can they do that in Sweden? Or are they just going to get a "so sorry, we'll be sure it doesn't happen again (until next time)?"
I veell seenk yuoor sheep und ploonder yuoor buuty und peellege-a yuoor vumee. Avast, yuoor feelleges und buets veell feer. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp! Arrrghh. I vurk vurk vurk und em keelhaul zee scuoorge-a ooff zee ooceuns. Um gesh dee vork vork vork!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Those warez of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!
If that's the case, charge the fucker.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If the server was running *nix, and had remote syslog configure to pipe all FTP logs to another server in another country. The IP address and files uploaded would be recorded. At that point, they will have to deal with hunting down the internet connection and who used it, which is easier said than done. Just a thought.
I remember when a friend came up to me and said. "Have you seen all those Juarez web sites?". I had no idea what he was talking about, except maybe that he was fascinated by going to a part of Mexico not known for tourism. Eventually I found out he meant warez, and sincerely was reading it wrong.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The company (Bahnhof) also posted the FTP logs on their site... Quite a lot of uploading going on there.
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
"Oh Snap!"
That phrase really dates you. I think you were looking for something more like:
"Homey don't play dat!"
Lame =).
I don't know what's more lame, the phrase you were referring to, our your attempted use of BBCode on Slashdot.
If they were busting the sites for the warez which they uploaded, then that would be planting evidence. If they were busting them for the other warez, then that would NOT be evidence planting. Get your terminology correct.
I don't know about Swedish law, but under American law providing servers and warez would probably be considered entrapment. (Entrapment is not as simple as many people think.)
Here is an example:
If a police officer sells someone 1 kg of marijuana, and then turn around and arrest them, and they have 2kgs of marijuana, then that is not planting evidence. It might be entrapment, but it depends.
If on the other hand, a police officer plants 1 kg of marijuana, and then busts them for having 2 kgs of marijuana, it is evidence planting. (Likely the arrest would be thrown out, because the police likely couldn't prove they didn't plant all of the marijuana)
If a police officer sells someone marijuana, and then busts them for posession, then it is probably entrapment (but there are exceptions).
If a police officer sells someone marijuana after being propositioned, then it is NOT entrapment.
IANAL, so YMMV.
There is no evidence a Snap Server was involved...
www.Snapappliance.com
Certain politicans and famous people in Sweden didn't like the actions of piratbyrån. They deem them too harsh, and they use contrersional teqniques that is deemed imorally in Sweden (but probably would be ok by US standards, go figure). Antipiratbyrån had bad press lately, and this is not making it better. Not at all. I'm not saying that stuff should be free on the net as some zealots may say, but they're using teqniques that is just... wrong. Heh, I used to have Bahnof as ISP. It was my first "broadband" ISP. At first I was quite relived at how much faster than dial-up it was. Then I was plagured with alot of down-times... I switched back to Tele2 eight months later, thought using their ADSL service instead.
That's not really planting evidence, it's a form of entrapment.
Who audits the auditors?
What do you call it when the cop gives you a kilo of grass, tells you it's free, then busts you for having it?
Or closer to this case: If somebody comes up and hands me a bunch of weed for free, then goes and gets a cop and tells them I have weed, and the cop comes and busts me?
Basically, somebody gave the guy servers and loaded warez onto them, then told the cops to bust the man. You can't tell me that's right. I may not know the legal terminology here, but it still ain't right nevertheless.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If the charge is distributing copyrighted material, how are they going to prove that this was going on?
Possession is not illegal. Sharing between friends is fully legal in Sweded, AFAIK.
So they can't bust you for having things on your computer, and how are they going to prove that you are distributing it? They would have to monitor your connection in real-time, wouldn't they?
If not, then what prevents me from doctoring logs "showing" my annoying neighbor distributing copyrighted material and getting his door kicked in by the industry's henchmen?
Clever signature text goes here.
a) A license (or broader: "authorization") to distribute freely, does not imply a change in its copyright status. See BSD, GPL or any other license.
b) By default distribution and reproduction are exclusive rights of the copyright holder. Even if you legally download it (signing no license at all), none of those rights have been given to you.
Perhaps you should read 5 of the GPL (it applies equally well to any other software without a license):
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I college I had a job as an assistant Sys Admin.
One day while talking about sending an e-mail to the users to delete files and make space, he asks me "Do you know who this user Warez is?" (*It was for a very small department of mostly post docs)
Feeling that hunch I say "I'm not sure, how do you spell it?"
"W-A-R-E-Z"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I'm pretty sure that Sweden has Bad People(TM) like every other place, but for some reason socialist propaganda (generally not Swedish) and common stereotypes suggest that just about everything except the weather is a little kinder, gentler and more socially aware than everywhere else.
For some reason I envision a maximum security prison in Sweden being more like a college dorm than a prison.
...with "unf." for a sig.
Our liability figures are low here in Scandinavia, so it probably wouldn't be worth the effort by itself. Right now, this is mostly a PR disaster. It does have some very interesting criminal prosecution possibilities though, all Bahnhof needs to do is to press charges. From there the public justice system would drag APB through court, and Bahnhof would have a walk-over in civil court afterwards. That is much more common here.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
For you guys who know swedish hereis an interview where the public radio calls Henrik Pontén (The APB lawyer in question previously) and ask him how they could do that. My favourite quote (Liberally translated to English): "We are currently very busy hunting pirates. I don't have time to check our webpage every day".
to be outlaws ?
Uh... According to their own admission, the "opposition" hijacked a domain belonging to the Antipiratbyrån. That's about the only illegal activity going on here that I see. This doesn't help the cause.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I have never heard of anybody getting raped in a norwegian prison, nor have I ever heard about anybody being beaten up without anybody caring. Nor have, in fact, ever heard any bad prison stories being told.
Clean prisons are what seperates us from the savages.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
..the sig of the person you're correcting? "(...) I am a lawyer. (...)"
Copyrights must be defended. Failing to do so means you lose your copyright.
Copyright does not have to be defended. Patents and trademarks must be. If you are careless with your copyright *notices*, it may exempt violators from liability. However, most any software/movie etc is full of copyright notices. As long as it is clearly marked as copyrighted, nothing can undo it nor the liabilities.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, its generally agreed that swedish prisons are probably amongst the most humane in the world. You get a tv in your cell, get good food, permissions, etc.
I heard, however, an interview with a swedish drug smuggler that got sentenced to prison in thailand. He said that hed rather be in a thai prison than a swedish, because the fellow prisoners that get inprisoned there are much more likely to be "normal" people (criminality because of poverty, etc), whereas the relatively few people that get to swedish long term prisons generally arent the people that youd want to hang around with.
They're not going to plant someone in a ISP for years to set up a server to bust the ISP. For likely, the infiltrator is actually an informant who cut a deal.
Vote for Pedro
Aren't Swedish Pirates called Vikings and don't they wear Horny hats instead of Eye patches?
Yep. You get paid as an inmate in a Swedish prison. You get better food in the prison than the student at the public schools. You get to watch television and do other nice stuff all day long.
We have people who, on a yearly basis, assaults someone just to be able to spend the cold winter months in jail.
Ah, and we don't have any "three strokes and your out" rule either.
Well, a "life sentence" is in general less than twenty years. Many here (and in Europe in general) consider the U.S. system quite cruel - not only due to the longer sentences but also the lack of compensation when mistakes are made - I remember reading about one case where someone was set free after 40 years but didn't receive any compensation (it was on CNN but I don't remember the names of those involved). Obviously, we've had some innocent people sentenced as well but they do get quite good compensation - and there's no need to sue anybody to receive it, last year one man that had been falsely convicted of murder and served 10 years received ~1.2 million (in USD). I consider our "softer" system better than the U.S. system since our crime rate is so much lower but do think that we should have the option to sentence the worst of the worst to life in prison so that it really means life.
Btw, a "maximum security prison" is viewed as an oxymoron by most people here in sweden because of a whole load of high profile escapes during the last few years.
Yesterdays front side news, for example, was that a sex murderer considered one of swedens most dangerous men escaped. He was on a walk with two (unarmed) wardens, when he ran away. One of them followed him, but was confonted by him waving a gun (a soft air gun as it turned out) standing next to a car with a nursery student (that also happened to be an olympic athlete) that he had seduced when she had her practice in his "closed" psychiatric unit. She helped him escape, but they were captured with no troubles a few hours ago. Freaky stuff! =/
my understanding of most escrow systems is that only the decrypt keys are stored in escrow, meaning while you can READ data with escrow key, you cannot write it, and thus you cannot tamper with data.
The way almost every public cryptosystem work is that the data is encrypted with a symmetric key, and this key is encrypted using public/private cryptography. Escrow systems have an additional private key to let you recover the symmetric key. At this point, you may modify any data you want.
The only way to avoid this is if you sign your data (assuming your private key is not also held in escrow, in which case they obviously can forge your identity). However, many times you use encryption without signing (I send a message to Bob, only Bobs private key can decrypt it, that's what I want) and in the case of encrypted storage systems you never do this.
So no, having an escrow key is in most cases as good as having the real one.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So this means that there are no warez on P2P servers unless planted by agent provocateurs?
..
Now I can sleep undisturbed again, knowing all is well
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Come on, hand them over - we know you have weapons of mass destruction, we have the receipts!
"Cats like plain crisps"
For some reason I envision a maximum security prison in Sweden being more like a college dorm than a prison. .se, it's a way of keeping society safe. Now I'm getting carried away again. I'd better stop typing. Argv, I cannot! but.. well, uhm. aaaaah[connection reset by peer]
I suspect that might be more correct insight than intended. There are people going to Sweden who would regard emprisonment a paid vacation. Maybe not maximum security prison, but prision isn't a punishment in
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
Do we (in this country, sweden, [I as a citizen of it, can only ask this of my country! You, you ought to ask it of your's..] ) live in a democratic society or a communistic one? ... I mean, we take away people's right to what is theirs .. and still insist to force it upon them, even though they do not want to comply. [this is the 'Unauthorized FileShareing [1]'-business, isn't it!!! deprive people of their right to what they've created...]
And !NO, don't give me any of 'those' excuse! If you don't like what they what as compensation for their works ... then move along, ignore them, and seek out people who'd like to share their works with you ... but for the 'Luve of my QuadDamage' don't force them to give it to you. That's like holding someone at gunpoint, and asking them to comply .... *jisses* where did 'free will' go all of a suddon?
I brougth in 'Communism' into the disscussion because that's the closes thing that [I found] describes 'Unauthorized FileShareing[1]'. I ask you, doesn't the description fit?
specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of
inequalities in the possession of property, as by
distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all
wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
[1913 Webster]
How would you feel if 'we' came into your house and started sharing your stuff with whom ever we choose? Would you like that?
Didin't you mother teach you to, "Don't treat someone, the way you wouldn't like to be treated."? ...
----
1 - Aquireing 'goods' (film, music, games, apps, books... etc etc) from a party that isn't amongs your peers.
NOTE: *just* 'FileShareing', amongst you and your peers (friends, and close friends of friends [to an extent/limit... as philosophically everyone on this planet can be seen as a friend of a friends :-)]) ought never be ilegall ... and not of the 'Unauthorzied FileSharing' I'm talking about...
Homey D. Clown (Damon Wayans) from In living color (circa 1990) called, they want their tag line back.
Talk about freakin' dated.
If you want to be a bit more modern (think: this millenium), please say "That's BULLCRAP!!!!"
Yes, all in caps, or you don't have RealUltimatePower!
STIM is the Swedish equivalent of RIAA, but more for the artist than the record labels themselves.
That's really beautiful, however in the US we spend a lot of effort keeping people in poverty and a kinder gentler prison system doesn't work on those people. It is absolutely ridiculous what we're doing, and also WRT the people unjustly imprisoned especially. Our prison is just a breeding ground for more dangerous criminals and a destroyer of lives. It is definitely more punitive than helpful...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Again, APB (Anti-Piracy Bureau) is not a law-enforcement bureau, it's not connected to the government in any way. It's a lobby organisation for the film and music industry. Strangely, they get the police to do whatever they tell them, they even appear on site at the same time as the police during busts. The police even recommended on their website that piracy crimes should be reported to APB, not the police.
Hmmm creative, but I don't think making sure that they have a bullet proof logging system is the first priority of most warez ftp servers...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
As far as the economic statistics go, I don't intend to contradict the parent poster at all, I just want to say you have to take them with the customary grain of salt. It's a different story with the crime rates: The parent is plain wrong. Crime rates in Sweden, and most of the EU in general, are lower than in the US. The provided link didn't work for me; maybe it was related to that Interpol report that inflated Sweden's murder rate to some 500% because of a statistical error? Again you must take care not to oversimplify things; maybe there are more pickpockets per capita in Sweden than in the US, or maybe they catch more pickpockets in Sweden (because the police aren't so occupied with homicides?), but when you visit Sweden you definitely don't have to be afraid that something really bad will happen to you. The crime rate is low.
Speaking of crimes, the actual topic would have been something about piracy or so? Oh well. Maybe next time.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Of course they make comparison in absolute numbers instead of against metrics like GDP - by this measure every European country is poor. And forget that with all that poor-dom, Sweden provides universal medical care, which American working poor can only dream of.
You may not realize this hanging out on "slashdot" all day, but Oh Snap! is currently under revival status by way of the decade old meme act of 1984. It is currently being used heavily on vh1, mtv, and other such oracles of pop culture, and its hil-fucking-arious. A quick search of your "World Wide Web" shows over 60,000 results, thereby cementing its relevance. Fa Sheezy.
music lover since 1969
True enough. Maybe that's why the post used median values instead? As from the blog:
(emphasis mine)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Very true. As a Swede living in the UK for the moment I have a hard time convincing lightheaded idealists and ordinary people alike that Sweden is very far from the paradise on earth they all too often envision it to be.
Even the almighty Swedish labour unions nowadays admit that the true unemployment figure is around 20%, far from the 5% the official statistics would have it at. Very few of my highly qualified friends back home have been able to find any sort of job at all upon leaving university.
Crime statistics do not make for uplifting reading either, and ethnic tensions are on the rise (partly because of the astronomic unemployment figures among immigrant - there is a part of Malmö where 90% do not have a (legal) job). Looking at those who do work, the disposable income per capita compares unfavorably to almost any other western nation.
This is not because of the current macroeconomic plunge. In fact, Swedish export industries are currently doing well. Yet, unemployment and related problems are, if anything, on the rise.
These facts and figures are currently hotly debated in domestic media, though opinions on what to do about the mess obviously differ sharply. In my view the probable root cause is a combination of the worlds highest taxes, the worlds most powerful labour unions and the worlds probably most generous sick leave benefits.
"Didin't you mother teach you to, "Don't treat someone, the way you wouldn't like to be treated."? ... "
No.
"Sweden provides universal medical care, which American working poor can only dream of."
So what you're saying is that by US standards, everybody lives in poverty, but if they get sick, they get free doctor visits?
Is this about right?
> 1) Police don't make deals. Procecutors do.
The police (at least in the US) can and do make deals with suspects, prior to arrest.
> 2) Swedish procecutor's do not. It's an american practice.
[snip]No idea about that, but smells like bullshit to me...
> If that's the case, then I don't think the argument of planting evidence is going to work.
There is a concept in jurisprudence called the Chain of Custody. This is how the integrity of evidence of criminality is maintained. The fact that the evidence in this case may be attributed to investigators hired by the plantiff (complainant) pretty much nixes the usefulness of it in any criminal prosecution.
>Entrapment isn't legal even if the police do it...
Beautiful. Tie it all together with the most misunderstood concept in pop criminal justice. To be brief, entrapment is not a crime. Entrapment has nothing whatsoever to do with planting evidence. It is defined in criminal procedure law as an affirmative defense, meaning that AT TRIAL a defendant would use this defense in order to say, "Yeah I did the actions alleged, but I cannot be convicted because any reasonable person would be compelled to do the same in those (entrapping) circumstances." (For instance, Officer Joe, out of the blue, says he'll give you ten million dollars if you (an IT professional who has never committed a crime) find him a bag of heroin. You track one down and he arrests you for criminal sale of a controlled substance. Basically entrapmemnt is if the act is something a reasonable person would do only because of the extenuating offer.)
>...It certainly isn't legal when a private citizen does it.
And, yeah. Wrong-o. Entrapment is only relevant if the offer comes from law enforcement in an effort to catch you committing a crime. (If I offer you ten million dollars to get me a bag of heroin and you do, thats a crime.)
Yes I work in law enforcement.
Which means that if you are driving along in a car in an area where prostitutes are known to congregate and you slow down next to a woman dressed like a prostitute and she says "50 bucks for a date; you buying?" and you say "Yeah" and she says "Too bad; I'm Vice Squad" then good luck telling a jury that it's entrapment. You clearly went there looking for some prostitute; the police did not create that crime by putting out an undercover officer pretending to be a prostitute.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/pdf/hdr04_ HDI.pdf
Read up on that, We are not top 2 in the Human development index for nothing....
Most complaints from norwegian prisons seem to center around how the food system works. (they get an alloted amount of points to spend each week, if I recall correctly, and buying health food and vegetables and fruit and such is difficult due to those items being more costly than meat and other "unhealthy" foodstuffs.)
So the correct way of getting a prostitute would be along the lines of...
...., but I guess we can do that...
Drive up to a woman dressed as a prostitute and start asking for directions.
If it is a prostitute, it's likely they'll try to convince you to buy sex. If it is a cop, they may try the same thing.
You reply along the lines of... "well, I just wanted to get to
If it is a prostitute, your mission was successful. If it was a cop, she can't arrest you because you've clearly state it wasn't your intent to pay for sex, and are doing it because she suggested it and if you just get directions, you can just move on and try again.
You are right: I had accidentially ignored the fact that median values are used, which deal with the issue of 1/3 of the US's wealth belonging to just 1% of the population. But still the flatter distribution of Swedish incomes means that poor Swedes are generally (ie on average) closer up to the Swedish median value than poor Americans are to the American median value, and household gross income still isn't the only factor as far as the standard of living is concerned. That aside, the Swedes are even poorer than I thought already, thanks for the correction.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
If the swedish court gets air of this, they can say bye-bye to their case. And after that they'll get sued... or even get charged with criminal offenses. Courts don't like people/organisations who plant evidence, most nations even have laws forbidding that kind of action.
The name is probably taken from the popular swedish agent novel Coq Rouge (meaning red rooster, code name for the agent in the novel). It is a perfect name for an infiltrator.
Speaking of crimes, the actual topic would have been something about piracy or so?
No, the original topic was something with illegal copying, nothing with naval robbery.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
The IFPI/RIAA is fighting a lost cause. And I think they know it.
/ freenet/website/pages/fairshare.php?rev=1.1).
First off all, I have difficulties with their acclaimed 'stealing' of music. As far as I know, stealing implies that the one that has been stolen has been derived of something. When you take a copy, you do not take the original away, thus they have not 'lost' anything. They might claim that they loose money when ppl d/l music, but even that is far from certain. Not only is it not shown statistically to have had that effect (they didn't even show a correlation thusfar - see aussie music-news - let alone a causality). Furthermore, in an individual case, they would have to show they actually lost revenue. Which is far from said, because I sure know some guys who d/l music, but would NEVER have bought that music if they were unable to d/l it. So, how did the RIAA/IFPI loose revenue, exactly? And if they didn't lose anything, how can the term 'stealing' apply?
It would still be copyright-infringement, ofcourse, but that's another matter. I think maybe it's time we went beyond our current system of copyrights and walk into the era of cyberspace. With the industrial revolution, patents and copyrights knew a high flight, maybe it's time to let it leave and try something new? Maybe something in the lines of this: fairshare (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*
And don't worry, contrary to what the RIAA claims, musicians will not starve to death, and music-making will not stop. We had music long before we had copyrights, and we will have music long after copyrights have vanished from the scene.
And lastly, it's something that *can not* be stopped. P2P progs and their development act as organisms that follow the darwinian rules of survival. When Napster was 'killed' by the RIAA, immediately others (like kazaa) took over, being more resistent to attacks from the RIAA&co. Whenever kazaa will be shut down, others again will take over. When endusers are targeted, systems that protect the user will become dominant (like FreeNet).
It really is a lost cause. But then again, they are not truelly battling for the survival of musicians (as I said; they will survive, just as they used to do), it's for their OWN survival they are fighting. There is no way in hell they are going to keep the giant profits that they have been gathering for the last decades.
But ultimately, they will have to do what P2P systems are already doing: adapt to the new circumstances (and forget about the former levels of profit), or whither and die.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
As my brother-poster pointed out, your phrase is about 15 years old.
"Oh Snap!" may date back a lot longer, but the mighty Bree Van Den Camp said it a lot more recently. And you do NOT want to fuck with the Bree.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Yes "pirate" has more than one meaning... a real meaning and a rubbish propaganda meaning. Avoiding the propaganda meaning is a way of showing your self respect and decency.
We have seen time and again that wordsmiths with an axe to grind are all too ready to butcher the language and hijack words in an attempt to confuse the gullible: freedom fighter / terrorist, gay / homosexual, disabled / challenged, bribe / expense payment... the list is as long as you like.
Sure we have a living language and that's why each person gets to decide what they are willing to accept and thus make their mark on the future (be it positive or negative).
They are. You're not comparing apples to apples here. For example, we Swedes have according to this reasoning become substantially richer during the past two-three years, as the dollar have lost about a third of its value against the krona.
Made us all a lot richer, didn't it? No, of course not. If anything it made us poorer because too much of our export is priced in dollars. Our standard of living as such hasn't changed because of this (yet, companies insure themselves against market fluctuations), while we're now ostensibly earning about what the average american does.
Truth of the matter is that the GDP per capita (average/median whatever) is a pretty poor indicator of wealth as it doesn't take the cost of living for the average family into account. Comparing with the time I worked in the US, yes, I made a lot more money, but it was almost all of it eaten up by a much higher cost of living. What little was left can be attributed to the difference between rich/poor here, i.e. I would be allowed to soar higher above the median/average, but also allowed to slide lower below it than here.
When you take many more factors into account then the picture is a lot different. Crime rate is one such. The "murder rate" (i.e. death due to violence, the courts don't factor into it) in the US is sky high compared to ours, some 8-9 times higher in fact. It's of course an interesting statistic in that it is fairly consistent from country to contry. And even within the same country over time. (Compared to say number of complaints filed, which is not.)
They would, if the cited work wasn't complete bunk to begin with.
Benchmarks don't lie. Liars (in this case a right wing so called "think tank") do benchmarks.
Anti-piratbyrån not piratbyrån. I use that torrent site myself, I actually quite like it. And heh, althought I still had bad experinces with the bahnof ISP...
Anyone remember SDFM? Yeah, that FTP site had superb US link and amazing hardware donated by the generous US law enforcement. I bet former Fastlane members and a few others still remember. That is what I call entrapment or a honeypot or whatever.
Rouge, OTOH, is a citizen who had ran his own site in the past before joining the big boys' ECD club. In the beginning everything goes fine: rouge enjoys being at the top of the game by
1) being a siteop on ECD, the couriering scene's "best kept secret"
2) winning a few weektops on it (and getting caught of cheating)
I suppose the horde of siteops on ECD started to fight about some nonsense after these golden months, because in the original (swedish) version of Bahnhof's report it says that rouge wasn't able to join ECD's staff channel any more. While the common practise in the warez scene is that trading monkeys and hardware-for-leech -donators shut up and sink in despair after losing their hold and money on a site, rouge chose to give the big boys a lesson.
It's just pathetic how APB couldn't handle the biggest "amateur piracy" case they will ever have in their hands. Shame on them.
Sidenote: I feel disgusted by the young swedish warez kids who think that internet piracy is a constitutional right to them. Wake up kids: there's no fun in doing it when it's legal and riskless.
You might work in US law enforcement, but you have no idea at all about European laws, in particular about Swedish ones. This is a case in Sweden, you ignorant fool -- and Sweden is in Europe, in case you didn't know that.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Even with a good lawyer's help, we still ended up paying a large some of money.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=1157&date=20 050323&PHPSESSID=d224d8dd687aba3d6d5e5bff06fd9c03
Nothing that I didnt restrict to the US or preface with "I have no idea about this" refers to US specific laws.
The concept of entrapment is clearly defined in law, irrespective of jurisdiction, and it is not equal to planting evidence.
Except in Sweden.
I'm sorry that you were upset. I will try to find out today what this "Europe" is.
The Local
Wat yuo meen he cant spel? Havnt yuo read on teh /. recently? Don't you speak l33t?
Seriously:
Rouge is also french for red. Coq rouge is a red rooster (which also could be the origin of the word for cockroach, how suitable!). Try thinking a little bit outside the frame of english next time.
The more you know, the less you need. [Admin added: from me.]
In Sweden, entrapment is illegal.
So is planting evidence.
Doesn't look like anyone was entraped here though.
Don't be so bloody stupid, of course there is violence in norwegian prisons. Whenever you lock up violent people in a prison facility, you're bound to deal with violence, even in little, far away Norway.
"there is a part of Malmö where 90% do not have a (legal) job"
/.:ers with no clue about Sweden, bork bork!)
/. of Sweden in a decay.
I take it you refer to the Rosengård area (where btw Juventus soccerstar Zlatan Ibrahimovic originates from).
Malmö is a town of ~250.000 inhabitants, the third largest city in Sweden. The Rosengård area constitutes ~21.000 inhabitants from as many as 50 ethnical groups. The official unenployment rate is 7% although I do agree that it would be much more in reality, but not the phenomenal 90% you claim, including illegal jobs! Where did you get such a figure from?
Just to give a perspective, that would be ~19.000 people you are talking about, including senior citizens and babies. Your 90% claim could be intepreted as hordes of vikings and immigrants doing nothing but piracy and illegalities (at least by some
Blaiming the union, taxes and sick leave benefits for swedish crime rates and poverty? Sheesh, you gotta be kidding me. Yes, I live in Malmö and I do not recognise the picture you are trying to post in
IANA politician or patriot.
The more you know, the less you need. [Admin added: from me.]
They've actually heard of "Swedish Chef" of the Muppets.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The correct URL is http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/pdf/hdr04_ HDI.pdf
Hey, the Dune novels called. They want their word back.
It's all George Bush's and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy! They were behind it!
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=1157/
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=1157 Ooops.
What gave them away was their username, "BorkBorkBork".
As anyone knows, if that had been a real account, it would have been "|30r||30r||30r|".
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
And pirates wonder why no one takes them seriously.
Poster 1: Well piracy hurts the artist.
Pirate 1: Well prove it then.
Poster 1: Well here's my proof.
Pirate 1: Oh phooy, that doesn't say what I want to say, so it must be rubbish.