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First Swede Convicted For File-Sharing Now Cleared
Caine writes, "A 29-year old Swede, who was the first to be convicted under last year's new file-sharing laws, has been cleared on appeal. The court of appeal did not consider the screen dumps provided by the Antipiracy Bureau enough evidence to be able to convict the man. Since the crime does not carry a high enough punishment under Swedish law to allow for a search of the defendant's house, this means it will be virtually impossible to prove file-sharing crimes in the future."
It's nice when a technicality works for the little guy, but a technicality is still a technicality and ideally, none should exist. The law should be fair and make sense. Not that that ever did or ever will happen.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Technicalities like that always amuse me, especially when they work out in favour of "the little guy". We have a few laws like that here in Canada, and I hope they don't change.
I don't consider this to be a technicality. I consider this to be the law working exactly as designed. Swedes consider privacy important, thus the police violating your privacy (seriously infringing your rights) in an attempt to find evidence of a much less serious matter is pretty idiotic. It would be like the police being allowed to shoot people they see speeding. It makes a lot of sense to me.
is still a point of dismay to me. The least those involved could do was not call it sharing. I do not know much about economics, but I do not see how it benifits a society to not freely share and celebrate music and other forms of art.
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"I do not see how it benifits a society to not freely share and celebrate music and other forms of art." I believe that people -- Americans in particular -- get very wigged-out when it is suggested that anything whatsoever might not be private property.
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It's true, but your argument puts it as exactly that - a technicality, where one law is rendered virtually unenforcable by another. In this case, privacy wins, and it would make sense for Sweden to simply remove the law from the books, since it's unenforcable clutter at this point in time.
I disagree. The law makes copyright infringement illegal, but not a serious crime. People may still be convicted of it, it is just that the evidence needs to come from something other than an invasion of privacy. People can still be convicted of this, just not en masse by some sort of automated system like the music distribution representatives would like. For yet another analogy, it may be illegal to smoke pot, but the cops can't invade your home to check without evidence. This does not mean the law can't be enforced, it just means they have to bust you in public places or when they break in with a different warrant.
Ehum, the police never searched his house, and neither the summary or the article itself says that as far as I can see. What it does say is that the police is not allowed to search someone's house for proof of file-sharing crimes, which means, together with the fact that screen dumps and logs are insufficient, that it's very hard to get someone convicted for filesharing.
It makes no sense at all to you because you haven't been on the receiving end of an illegal search.
The body of case law that requires the prosecutor's office to ignore evidence that has been illegally obtained is designed to stop illegal police searches, period. If the police constantly get cases tossed out because they are illegally searching people, at some point, police management is going to start training the cop on the beat in how to properly and legally conduct a search, and the illegal searches will at least, get less common.
However, if your idea of being able to use the evidence anyway got a legal foothold, any idea of a search being illegal would quickly go out the door, and the police would be able, in practice, to search anyone, anywhere they wished.
Not the way to protect privacy, in my opinion.
As to your idea of punishing the cop that conducts the illegal search, well, that's another story. Rightly or wrongly, our justice system tends to protect the cop on the beat. Sometimes, I think it goes too far, but on balance, they ARE the ones putting their lives on the line for us, and some leeway should acrue for that sacrifice.
As to the punishment, that DOES happen, internally, and out of public view. Do you think that a cop that constantly wastes police time and resources AND prosecutorial time and resources by constantly conducting illegal searches that get cases tossed out DOESN'T get brought up short by his boss? I'll bet they do. Police agencies all over the world are constantly short of budget, personnel, and other resources. Prosecutors' offices are much the same. They can't just let these things go, because they waste time and money. Cops that search illegally on a regular basis get pulled off the street and get re-educated and retrained. Those that keep it up will eventually get canned.
I can understand your reasons for your rant - we all have gripes with the justice system; it's not even close to perfect. But I'd rather the system encourage the cops to obey the constitutional guarantees of freedom the Bill of Rights gives us than allow them to ignore them. Yes, criminals will get released. But most criminals aren't very smart - if the cops don't get them this time, they will the next.
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