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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."
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.
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.
And here in America, the government is officially by, of and for the people.
Any other spectacularly ignorant insights you want to share with us?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course they dropped the case. Now that the Pirate Bay servers operate out of North Korea, it's out of Swedish jurisdiction. Plus, they probably don't want to provoke the wrath of Kim "I've got nukes!" Jong-Il...
Why yes, we are. It's a long Swedish tradition to be herded by idiots.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
"[P]olice and prosecutor being charged with official misconduct, but the judges dropped the cases"
a nd#2004_death_in_custody_controversy_and_riot or do a search.)
And this is why the police and prosecutor will continue to break the law. This happens everywhere, unless the police are required to actually obey the law, there is no incentive to. Even when they are punished, it generally amounts to a slap on the wrist.
The police can and will arrest people who have done nothing wrong (I and a number of others at a protest during the Forbes conference in Sydney in 2005 for example, all the charges were either dropped or thrown out of court, except those people who pleaded guilty).
It isn't just illegal raids or arrests either. In Queensland an Aboriginal man was killed while in police custody. It was latter shown that he shouldn't have even been arrested, and that he was beaten to death. The police officer responsible continues in his duties (though he has been transferred from Palm Island). Actually, apparently he has now been charged, with manslaughter, after a former NSW chief judge examined the evidence.
(See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Island,_Queensl
So, it is obvious that the police need to be held accountable for their actions. While it is possible in most places to sue them (in the civil court), and this is what the various owners and users of these seized servers should do, the judge often finds that the police "were just doing their duty". No they fucking weren't! They were going beyond their duty.
I wank in the shower.
If the Ten Commandments were a "living document" (as some claim, US Constitution ought to be), it would've been found to contain the "Thou shall not violate copyrights" by now...
Synzronvg zl nff...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Wow, this sounds like hassling that has worked against TPB.
You host TPB servers. We will just randomly take the servers to the police station and shut down your business for weeks. And, you can't touch us with misconduct charges or anything.
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?
...the Swedish Minister of Justice was quoted as saying "BORK!!!!" "BORK BORK BORK BORK BORK!!!!", made a rather obscene hand gesture, and walked away.
They've also given us the ever useful "bork, bork, bork!"
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Constitution of the United States is a "living" document. However, that said, the amount of life in it is only equal to the interest of the People of the United States in maintaining and safeguarding it. The Federal Government's task is to interpret the will of the people and create consensus (not just majority rule), the modify the document accordingly. This has been done in the past to rectify the injustice of slavery, provide women their given right to vote, and even to limit the power of the President of the United States by limiting the number of terms possible to serve in the office to two.
If there's a problem with a "living" document, it's that it has been alive so long, that provisions contained within it have outlived their original intent and have not "evolved" to stay current with the progress of society. I think it's safe to say this is true of a great many non-Constitutional laws as well. I think a new breath of life needs to be applied to the Constitution if it is to continue to server the people in this century and those to come.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
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).
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
In my mind, there is a significant difference between the US government meddling in a country's political processes, and some religious group taking someone to court. You should not equate the US population, its government, US corporations, various religious institutions, and other organizations under one banner of "US meddling." Its not like there is one master brain that controls all of those groups and people.
Posted AC due to the vanishingly small number of Slashdot moderators that earning a living making or distributing media. The problem isn't that the state of copyright infringement is keeping people who earn a living making media from profiting. It's that it is keeping people who make a living distributing media from profiting. The distributors don't pay the makers any differently whether the film is pirated or not. The real problem is that we no longer need the distributors; And they don't like it. It is time for a paradigm shift.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
PB can buy all the Sealands they want; Hollywood and the rest will just sue the ISPs for providing the bandwidth.
Given their budgets they could also hire some mercenaries and mount an attack on Sealand themselves.
If they filmed it they might make a profit on it, too.
Copyright (c) 2007 by me writing as "Ungrounded Lightning Rod".
Leave a followup to any posting in my journal with a firm offer if you want to do the movie. Otherwise I may sue for copyright infringement if such an attack is made, filmed, and the film shown for profit - even on a news operation under the same umbrella corporation. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.)
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
The problem with that is, just whose definitions do you use? The Constitution, like any written document, is subject to interpretation simply because while individual words have a limited range of meaning, their many and varied combinations can be interpreted along a wide spectrum. That's why we have a court system: to try and create a reasonable definition of a law in any given circumstance. Two opposing sides in an argument will generally insist on an interpretation biased toward their definitions. It's up to the court system to try and create consensus, and where not possible or practicable, to enforce a definition based on the court's definitions. And so then you have appeals, as people disagree with the court's definitions, all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter in most legal cases.
The same problem exists with the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. Seems straightforward. But thou shalt not kill what? Men? Women? Dogs? Cat? Ameobas? Fetuses? You can take a simple 4-word phrase and interpret it in myriad ways, all because of what it doesn't say as much as what it does say.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Defendant, goes home, gets a job and returns to a steady bill payer's lifestyle.
The RIAA . . . well . . .
Nevermind. I really don't care what happens to them.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
So let's say the recording industry has 150,000 copies of Brittany's Greatest Hits on the shelf, and someone makes a digital copy of same. How many copies does the recording industry have? 150,000 -- just like when they started.
So when you come up with a way to make a copy of a Corvette on a car dealer's lot, but leave the original one there on the lot, you will have an analogous situation. Otherwise you've fallen into the trap of equating copyright violations with theft, the very mistake the *IAA are trying to talk everyone into.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
It's just funny.
It's funny, because some american politician are pathetic how they try to actually take over the net.
If anything happen to the root DNS, the history will just follow the same path it did with any open-source or other open- projects : fork.
Just like when CDDB2 became comercial, poeple just switched to freedb.org (which contained the last public copy of the data), if the root DNS gets pwned by politicians with agenda, most probably a couple of alternative server will emerge. And because this is usually handled by the ISP itself (they just change which DNS server their servers have to ask), the users won't even notice the change.
Maybe there may be some initial fragmentation, as people try to settle for 1 single root-DNS-replacement (and not a dozen of non-synced-between servers). But as mot countries administer their own domains only com/org/net and such will be affected.
In fact there are already some alternative root DNS that exists, in order to provide new top-domains not provided by the official root.
So, no. The loss of the root DNS will not be the end of the internet as we know it. It'll be only a way to produce a lot of pissed administrators.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Considering most people outside of people who would visit Pirate bay (aka hackers/crackers/pirates/ what ever you want to be called) and people on sites like Slashdot (cool people) don't even know a raid happened. I'd say it'd be forgotten in a month.
It's not waco. No one died, a bunch of computers got seized... Sadly no one cares no matter how many rights are brought up.
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.
"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."
Apparently you need to learn how torrents work. It's nothing like Napster. You don't "pull stuff" from PB. They don't serve any content. PB has no idea what content you downloaded, nor do they have any idea who got content from whom, any more than a phone book company knows who you called or what you talked them about.
Since you could download a torrent file from PB and then delete it without ever opening the file with a bittorrent client, data collected from PB about who downloaded torrent files is therefore meaningless and legally useless. You have to collect evidence on the actual transfer of content, which never touches a PB server. And, in case you haven't noticed, the RIAA is turning out to be terribly incompetent at doing that.
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.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock