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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...
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."
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.
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.
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.
This is illegal in Sweden, FYI.
"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.
Law enforcement hires a hitman and then arrests him before he does the job - like right after he accepts some money. They do not commit murders themselves to become part of a group that does such (that we know of). They can pretend to be drug buyers in order to catch dealers, but it's not OK to become a low level dealer (selling to the public anyway) in order to move up the food chain to reach the source - or does this happen?
And of course as you should know, in Sweden, entrapment is illegal.
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.
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'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.
The fact is that these people are not on a moral high ground. They do data mining, illegal monitoring of online activity, entrapment, illegal entry, and so on, and still they keep complaining about a bunch of kids swapping files.
Trying to lobby for fascism and using illegal methods to terrorize individuals and trying to scare people into submission is far more serious than file swapping in my book.
The way to deal with file swapping is not to lobby for laws that take away rights from the consumers. The way to deal with it is to adapt to the market, not set up cartels and do massive lobbying to choke the market until it behaves the way the megacorporations want it to.
Clever signature text goes here.
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".
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 always wondered if there were republicans/conservatives in Sweden. Guess I know for certain now.
..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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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." ---
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.
No, this is not correct. STIM is an organization dedicated to protect composers, mostly collecting royalties from radiostations etc. for broadcasting music. The American equivalent of this would be ASCAP.
The stars that shine and the stars that shrink
in the face of stagnation the water runs before your eyes
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