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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.
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?
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.
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.
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'