Pirate Bay Raid Investigation Finished

A Pirate writes "The Swedish Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has finished the investigation of the Pirate Bay raid where close to 200 servers were confiscated. Just a fragment of these were actually Pirate Bay's and this led to both the police and prosecutor being charged with official misconduct, but the judges dropped the cases. In the report published by the JO he concludes that the judges were right, but there is also some very interesting information about how the MPA, IFPI and the American embassy tried to push the Swedish Minister of Justice and Secretary of State into influencing the police and the prosecutor to act upon The Pirate Bay."

Comments

There is a precedent for US internet meddling

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

That precedent was Scientology busting anon.penet.fi remailers. The US does not control the internet and hopefully as time goes by legal jurisdictions around the world will rule against heavy handed American tactics.

Re:Good.

[dinodipp]

In Sweden (where I live) there is little point of sueing for money. You really won't get much if you do. I think that is generally a good thing since it means that there is not much point in sueing unless you feel you really need to. I also think that the looser of the trial pay the winners trial expenses but i can be wrong.

They do this all the time

[Threni]

The US poke their noses into the business of countries around the world. They're currently also trying to get the Dutch to follow the disastrous drug prohibition policy that's failed so badly in the US, instead of the Dutch policy of allowing the sale of cannabis and magic mushrooms which has worked well for decades now.

Yanking 186 servers for a week is not misconduct?

[Dekortage]

FTA: "...a total of 186 servers were confiscated from PRQ's server rooms. This led to that a big number of companies and a lot of small and large websites lost their servers and in many cases their primary livelihood. ...It took them over a week before they decided to give back some of the servers that was not related to Pirate Bay."

If this were in the U.S., all the affected businesses would probably sue the government over lost revenue. Alternatively (or additionally) they would sue PRQ for co-hosting them with known criminals that made them vulnerable to such police action. Then they would sue the vendor who made PRQ's servers (e.g. Dell or whoever).

Re:I disagree with the tactics.

[Bat Country]

Actually, people continued producing games for the Apple][ long after the Macintosh came out (in 1984, one might note) although they were largely educational titles.

You may find MobyGames enlightening on the subject.

Over a hundred games were produced for the Apple][ after 1987.

The only problem was that the *good* games at the time were either being produced for the major game consoles (for the superior interface and faster load times), arcade machines (greatly enhanced power and graphics), or the PC (far greater home market saturation.)

So in short, your point on video games is completely off-base.

Finally, there's no way in hell that net piracy could at any time in the near future make it unprofitable to sell video - even if it were legalized - for the simple reason that the downloads are nonpermanent (even if you burn them), not easily loaned to friends, prohibitively slow (hours to download a movie, faster to get to the video rental store), and nontechnical people can't do it easily (and we've seen that most nontechnical people don't like doing ANYTHING that isn't easy - including voting.)

Re:Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a legal *OWNER* of PaintShopPro 7, You dont own PaintShopPro 7, you license it. This is a key distinction that many people forget. Nope, he owns a copy of it. The EULA doesn't meet several of the requirements for a valid contract.

Huh?

[Slashdot Parent]

Monetary damages due to pirated intellectual property are nothing but myth. And as community-shared intellectual property matures, the myth just becomes more and more absurd.

This is an absurd statement.

Let's say I go purchase the latest and lousiest pop CD I can find, and then make it available to the world on The Pirate Bay. 10,000 people download it. Are you trying to tell me that none of those 10,000 downloaders would have purchased the CD had it not been available free of charge?

Copyright holders really do suffer losses due to piracy. Most people (including myself) believe that the losses are drastically overstated by the record labels, but it's a little naive to think that piracy doesn't cut into their revenue stream at all.