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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."
Legal or not, a raid that takes down a ton of sites as collateral damage is a fricking joke. What's the worst case scenario? They actually have to do an investigation, rather than just whacking a whole data center?
If I owned a site that was taken down for the crime of using the same host as TPB, I'd be assembling a team of rabid attack lawyers, and training them to go for the wallet.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If one person buys the DVD and distributes it to the world does anyone really believe that movies will keep getting made.
Of course they will. They just won't be sold on DVD.
But do you think it's likely that that will happen?
I wonder how the JO would feel if he were kicked out of his house or lost his car or his paycheck for a week because his neighbors were under investigation.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
The reason why it is such a big deal that 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 is because of this: according to the Swedish law it is not permitted for the Minister of Justice to tell what the police should do (in Swedish we call this 'ministerstyre'). The minister is not even allowed to speak on individual cases. To you guys in the US or Britain this might seem weird, but that's how things work over here.
What happened with the raid on Pirate Bay could very well be a constitutional offense. That is of course after the Committee on the Constitution have properly investigated it. This is serious business.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
It is certainly within the power of people on the Internet to eliminate all profit associated with DVD movies. Almost overnight.
The question that people need to think about is "We have the power. Should we use it?" This was done in the 1980's for the Apple platform - nobody produced games for this after around 1984 or so because pirate BBS were so prevalent that it was impossible to make any money selling a game. The same can be done for DVD movies.
It can also be done for music. Books are a little harder, but as soon as Google Books is cracked there will be little need for anyone to actually do something hard to acquire the text of a book.
Why isn't this happening? Mostly, laziness I feel. And lack of organization.
I punched "top gear past episodes" into Google (honestly looking for a way to pay someone for the content) and among the results was a link to PB's site; Seasons 1-8 available in a single 29GB torrent. Eight years of BBC copyrighted material plus Clarkson's movie in a single download. All festooned with adds I'm pretty sure the BBC isn't getting a cut of...
Whatever you think of the policy and practice of the copyright police, there is no way in hell that is going to be tolerated indefinitely by media producers and distributors. PB can buy all the Sealands they want; Hollywood and the rest will just sue the ISPs for providing the bandwidth. The rest of the world will continue to be more than happy to let the US legal system do the dirty work.
If you've been pulling stuff from PB don't be surprised when you get a letter a year from now with a bill attached. It's been a few years since the Napster hubbub and both new arrivals and recalcitrant veterans need to (re)learn how it works.
Posted AC due to the vanishingly small number of Slashdot moderators that earning a living making or distributing media.
Well, as this is Slashdot and not an academic paper, I really can't be fucked doing such a study or finding evidence to support my position. However, I have read and been told of a number of cases where the police have used excessive force when arresting suspects or shooting people (black people who have wallets for example). The Rodney King case is an example, or numerous cases during the civil rights movement in the '60's.
The case where I did provide evidence to the contrary, I only found out that the cop was being charged after looking for information on the case. And it was only after an independent person examined the evidence.
Also, as a comment somewhere above points out, in Sweden you basically have no recourse when suing the government. The another comment in the same thread talks about the Steve Jackson games case.
As to your question about the police and prosecutors. I simply quoted that from the summary. But they work together. The police arrest you and attempt to find evidence to convict you, the prosecutor attempts to convict you. They both have an interest in having guilty verdicts.
I wank in the shower.
The other aspect of this is that any agreement has to be reached by the mutual consent of two parties. AFAIK the U.S. has not resorted to threats of physical violence in these cases (Iran, Iraq, North Korea excepted). So the agreement is entirely socio-economic. The U.S. says if the Dutch don't do what they want, they'll take their ball and go home. While that's certainly immature behavior on the part of the U.S., it is well within its rights to do so. The Dutch do not have a fundamental right to play with the U.S.'s ball, and their rights are not being violated if the U.S. decides to take the ball away.
So then the question is simply one of negotiation and price. The Dutch evaluated what the U.S. was offering for complying with the U.S.'s requests, and decided it wasn't worth it. The Swedes did the same, and decided it was worth it to them to comply with the U.S.'s requests. The Swedes are the ones you should be mad at - they sold out. The U.S. did not hold a gun to their heads, they simply offered certain things (including possibly the threat to take away existing socio-economic relationships). The Swedes were the ones who decided it was worth it to them to do what the U.S. wanted. You do the same kind of decision-making when buying a car, unless you're one of those people who always pays whatever the dealer asks for.
Yes, the U.S. may use its economic clout to bully others. But those policies are what allowed it to gain that economic clout in the first place. It's irrational to believe it would spontaneously give up that which allowed it to become powerful (and indeed one could argue that it remains powerful because it adheres to those policies). Like all bullies, if you want to get rid of them, you have to stand up to them. The world's economy is 3x larger than the U.S.'s. The U.S. needs the world more than the world needs the U.S.
That's a nice breakdown. Another difference between material objects and copyable files is that there's a sort of coercive element to the material -- we've got it, if you want it, you gotta pay what we're asking. Files can, with some effort, be gotten for free. The value of the commercial product is in quality of the files and overall packaging, as well as ease of access. These are things worth paying for, even if you could get the content for free, though as you outline, what people are willing to pay will vary. However, the lower the price, the more people there are who will be willing to pay.
For myself the only exception is music sold by RIAA member labels (EMI, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, others). As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how they price their product, they aren't going to get one red cent from me until they stop suing their customers, especially the weakest amongst us like children, single mothers, people on disability.
Loose lips lose spit.