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First Swede Prosecuted For File Sharing
praps writes "The Local reports that a 27-year old man who allowed people to download a film from his PC has become the first Swede to be charged with illegal file sharing, after a tip-off from the country's notorious Anti-Piracy Bureau. It's a critical test case, as prosecutors say that anything less than a prison sentence would make future prosecutions unlikely." From the article: "The case was brought after a tip off from Antipiratbyrån (APB), a lobby organization set up by the media industry to combat illegal downloading in Sweden. Since the man was reported APB has found itself in hot water, with an Internet company accusing the organization itself of illegally downloading films and games.
I thought the headline First Swede prosecuted for sharing files on net was fairly ominous but then I felt better after I read down a bit...
Here's a quote from the prosecutor:
"As these cases do not involve criminals, but instead quite ordinary people who share their files, any prison sentence would certainly be suspended," Rudström said.
Is it just me or does this sound like something that would be said by a defense attorney?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Since the man was reported APB has found itself in hot water, with an Internet company accusing the organization itself of illegally downloading films and games.
More exactly: for paying a person to infiltrate an ISP to download and spread copyrighted files there, and later sue that ISP. I don't think the infiltrator was actually employed by the anti-piracy bureau; he just got some money to do the job. Also, it's not known anyone else at APB has in any case done this themselves. It's still of course quite dirty tactics to sue an ISP, and I hope they're not getting away with it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
On the same note. Maybe prison in Sweden is not bad after all, or so we can learn from this article.
With such prisons he might as well trade a large money fine for a few years in the no-security prisons in Sweden.
(Is there wi-fi in these prisons, I wonder)
Just under a week ago the district procesutor in Malmö, Sweden's biggest city, closed a case, Involving three filesharers from that region, cause "The government should not use more force then nessasary". Your IP-Adress is protected under our official secrecy act. And if the procesutor traced the ip-adresses he would be in volation. And had therefor no case.
My post was not flamebait nor stupid. I was just trying to make a joke, but I obviously did strike on a sensible point. You need to relax, I am not of the ??AA...
;-)
has it ever occured to you that it's possible to just *look* at a website
Yet, I usually look at websites whose subject I'm interested in. Maybe you don't
Because the national pasttime in America is shouting your moral values at other people. Sometimes you even have to exaggerate a little to get your point across. Making file-sharers out to be dirty villains deserving of jail time or worse is completely expected.
Now this will certainly crack you up, but it turns out that Swedish public access radio (SR) channel P3 did an interview with Antipiratbyrån (APB) a while ago. APB then went ahead and published this interview on their website. Naturally, republishing a recording from radio is an obvious copyright violation.
Somehow, SR discovered this. They brought their legal counsel into the studio, rang up APB, and confronted them. APB's response?
* Firstly, they try to claim that they only link to the audio clip, and not a copy of it. The legal counsel shoots this down immediately citing a court decision where linking directly to a file is equivalent to sharing a copy.
* Secondly, APB claim that what they are really looking for are pirates who make a lot of money from their piracy. As has been discussed pretty heavily in Swedish media, this kind of piracy is virtually nonexistent in Sweden.
* Thirdly, they dismiss the whole thing, because, and this is the best thing: THEY ARE TOO BUSY HUNTING DOWN PIRATES!
This news hasn't really broken yet, and because of easter holdays I believe it won't until early next week.
Skip
Is it still considered one file if the movie was split into .rar files??? .r01, .r02... .r95?
...it was always explained to me by lawyers back when I first started writing programs that copyright and patent and trademark were only supposed to be civil constructs for the early protection of the originator, giving them a chance to make first fair use of their creations.
They were NOT supposed to be used to create monopolies on things like calling "dibs" on the front seat of the car in perpetuity when you were a kid. The onus was on the originator to take steps to protect their turf at the outset, and from then on. It was up to the originator to perform due diligence in enforcement of their transitory rights in the matter or lose them. These were NOT rights in the same sense as freedom of speech and so on, these were legal constructs based in laws and not presupposed natural holdings recognized in the US Constitution.
Now it's at the point that various associations are unilaterally taking it upon themselves to do the due diligence on behalf of the originators and in most cases with no legal agreement to perform that representation on their behalf. Only the parties directly affected have any standing and they must do their own work short of legal assignment of rights and/or responsibilities by binding contract.
You cannot merely imply that a third party has standing simply by virtue of the subject matter. IOW, you can't simply have the RIAA do your copyright enforcement for no better reason than they are a recording association and you made a recording. You have to enter into an agreement or they have no business doing your enforcement for you. That's the way it was explained to me when I wrote my first program and like an adult, I accepted my responsibilities.
Moving it from the civil side to the criminal side is the next level of lunacy. As most every lawyer I've ever spoken with agrees, we already have some several hundred times more laws than we can possibly enforce, causing us to reduce more and more criminal offenses to de minimus status, where they aren't worth the time of the authorities to go after.
If we continue on this path unabated, we will get to the point that the police will have to either put all this crap on the back burner and ignore most of it, or they will have to become a weird combination of the firemen of Fahrenheit 451 and the thought police of 1984. Is this really what we want?
The other consequence is growing civil unrest and here in the age of the global Internet, with cryptography and hacking knowledge being so freely availible, and the growing anti-corporate socialistic mindset combining more and more with basic human cynicism, we're looking at more and more subversive and reactionary fighting back.
Does it only seem like the future is going to end up like some techno-future anime? I am all for growing rabid peaceful noncompliance, fighting them to a standstill, until a peace treaty of sorts can be worked out if only in terms of a gentlemens' silent agreement. We need to come to an accomodation somewhere in between before it is too late.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I just noticed that the mplayer site had a 'shut down' notice, now it's not responding at all, altho google has a cached
version of the "closed for patent infringement" statement. Hmmm, it was just updated with a redirection to the closed notice.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I did it because I loved the Muppets character called Swedish Chef. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Bork" is not a very common word in Swedish, as far as I know. "
Refer to aforementioned Muppet chef.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You don't get to play the holier than thou information is property card unless the producers that you speak of, go back and pay for all of the works that they used to create their derivitive works. (i.e. every idea in every movie, right down to the language itself.)
Just because someone doesn't know you took a five dollar bill out of their wallet, and just because they don't call the police, doesn't mean that you haven't stolen from them. Based on the "IP" concept, every movie, song, book out there is a pirate work. As a matter of fact, so is every post made here.
I have a plan that would remove all this nonsense and that is an insurance for people who use p2p. People can pay a small sum per month and if a company sues that individual for copyright theft the money from the insurance pays up for the lawsuit and damages. And as companies only sue a minor number of people an insurance company would also make money.
A person can not get persecuted for downloading a file, because it's not illegal. Sharing that file on the other hand is.
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