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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...
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.
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!
That's NOT what the GPL is for. Submarining shi[tt] is wrong, whichever side does it.
Mind you, I can see the NEXT PROFIT MODEL:
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.
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?
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
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
These industry backed organizations pretend to be on a moral high ground, but the fact is that they engage in illegal and immoral activities.
To me, entrapment, cartels, lobbying to remove individual rights, choking the market, terrorizing people with frivolous lawsuits, etc. are all far more serious than a bunch of kids swapping files.
So yes, they are the evil ones, and the methods they are using to deal with kids swapping files are outrageous.
This is a load of crap, and you know it.Clever signature text goes here.
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".
Looks like a 21st century version of Sergeant Norman Pilcher's campaign against rock star druggies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
..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"
These are some of the members companies of the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau. My guess is that most anti-piracy groups are run by them.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
CAPITOL FILM DISTRIBUTION
Columbia TriStar Films
Microsoft
PAN Vision
Paramount Home Entertainment
Sandrew Metronome
Scanbox Entertainment
Universal Pictures
Vivendi Universal Games
Warner Home Video
Universal Music
EMI Music
Sony Music Entertainment
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.
No, Piracy is violence and murder atop the high seas. Selling thousands of bootleg copies of Windows XP or Britney Spears is both a violation of good taste and large scale copyright infringement.
Nothing annoys me more than people referring to copyright infringement as 'piracy'. It does a dishonour to those I know who have actually had to fend off real pirates in their time (e.g. my best mate's dad, who's Chief Engineer on a very large Shell product carrier.)
You're doing it wrong.