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:There is a precedent for US internet meddling

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oh but they are trying. If they gain control of the root DNS servers they are going to fucking ruin the Internet as we know it.

Good.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Good.

[Overzeetop]

and training them to go for the wallet.

I thought that was an innate ability of all lawyers. Attacking the govenernment with little chance of seeing hard cash - now that would take some real training. If you could do that and manage to train them to ignore the money in your wallet - now that would be quite a trick!

Re:Good.

[Farmer Tim]

I'd be assembling a team of rabid attack lawyers, and training them to go for the wallet.

You don't need to train lawyers to go for the wallet, that's the instinct that makes them lawyers in the first place.

Re:Good.

[mungtor]

So what you're saying is that if only one person will stand up and say "Yes, I would have purchased product XYZ but I downloaded it instead" you'll admit that piracy actually does cause monetary damage to the original creators of the content? I'm pretty sure there are a few people who would admit that they took the cheaper option.

In a lot of TPB cases we're not talking about $0.99 per song either, but about somebody who would rather not pay $700 for Photoshop. Maybe Adobe wouldn't have gotten the money, but it's very possible that MacroMedia (bought JASC) is out the $150 they get for Paintshop as an alternative. So even though there is no monetary damage to Adobe, somebody else also loses a sale.

Re:Good.

[AusIV]

So if a company suffered financial damage because a careless raid took down their website, they have no recourse? Perhaps America's not so bad after all.

Re:Good.

[packeteer]

As a legal *OWNER* of PaintShopPro 7,

You dont own PaintShopPro 7, you license it. This is a key distinction that many people forget.

Re:Good.

[dbc001]

I just bought an iPod. By your logic, maybe Creative wouldn't have gotten the money, but it's very possible that Microsoft is out the $300 they get for a Zune as an alternative. So even though there is no monetary damage to Creative, somebody else also loses a sale.

This isn't logic, this is marketing. It's PR that Intellectual Property interests (BSA, RIAA, MPAA, etc) have been working on for quite some time. It simply doesn't hold up to rational discourse. 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.

What did you expect?

[Infinityis]

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...

Re:Hey Swödige ! Act up !!

[Eudial]

You are tall, well-fed, healthy people in a free land. Are you going to let yourselves be herded by shit that does the bidding of Mafiaa ?

Why yes, we are. It's a long Swedish tradition to be herded by idiots.

Police and prosecutor should be prosecuted.

[apathy maybe]

"[P]olice and prosecutor being charged with official misconduct, but the judges dropped the cases"

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,_Queensla nd#2004_death_in_custody_controversy_and_riot or do a search.)

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.

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.

Looks like the man won

[mochan_s]

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.

Re:I disagree with the tactics.

[91degrees]

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?

In response to the pressure...

[pulse2600]

...the Swedish Minister of Justice was quoted as saying "BORK!!!!" "BORK BORK BORK BORK BORK!!!!", made a rather obscene hand gesture, and walked away.

Swedish Constitutional Law 101

[Hackie_Chan]

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.

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).

There is a difference between...

[MyNameIsFred]

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.

Re:There is a difference between...

[Woldry]

Its not like there is one master brain that controls all of those groups and people.

Oh yes I do... I mean ... there is...

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.)

And now for TPB's reaction

[ravenspear]

Check out their current PTR record.

dig thepiratebay.org
> 83.140.176.146
dig -x 83.140.176.146
> IN PTR hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepirate bay.org.

Re:Hey Swödige ! Act up !!

[The Angry Mick]

I wish the RIAA would agree to resolve their cases the same way the old Swedish kings used to settle their wars:

1. RIAA rows out into the middle of a fjord in a boat filled with all of their money.
2. Defendant rows out in a boat filled with all his money.
3. Both sides bash each other about the head with large cudgels.
4. Boats sink due to critical imbalance.
5. Money sinks to bottom of fjord, never to be seen again.

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.

As usual...

[mengel]

The analogy is horribly broken, because if you steal a Corvette from a dealer, they do not have the unit to sell it.

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.

Re:As usual...

[bonhomme_de_neige]

Agreed. But if they had 150,000 copies, and 150,000 people ready to purchase, and one makes that digital copy, now they can only sell 149,999 -- they are left with one copy.

No, from the start they didn't have "150,000" copies. They had one master copy, and a potentially infinite number of digital copies to sell. The cost of producing the master copy has nothing to do with the number of copies sold. So, who decided that the "number of people willing to buy" was 150,000?

The missing piece is this: price. They had, say, 50,000 willing to buy at $1, another 50,000 willing to buy at $0.50, and another willing to buy for $0 (that is, willing to download and listen to the song - not the same as someone who just doesn't like the song, or movie or whatever).

Although it might seem like that last group adds no benefit to the recording industry, that's not the case. Those people might tell others about the song ($billions are spent on advertising every year - so you can't just ignore the value of this), or the might go to concerts, or they might by other merchandise which is not digitally reproducible (you can't download a Metallica t-shirt, at least not without investing some time and equipment in printing your own).

So - no problem if everyone buys at the price they're willing to pay. This is an example of "differentiated pricing", which is taught about in an introductory economics course as a good thing, something industries strive for (examples cited in your textbook will be "child tickets" for movies and events). The only problem is if the people willing to pay $1 get the song for free instead. (Back to the original point - this is the only source of "lost revenue" due to piracy in the equation).

This problem is easily addressed as follows: those people who are willing to pay more place a value on their own time. To them, the opportunity cost of spending 20 minutes to look for a torrent is more than paying $1. Thus, they would rather spend 2 minutes and pay $1 to get the song than spend 20 minutes and get it for free. It might seem hard to believe such people exist if you're not one of them, but believe me they do. These people pay $3 for a bottle of spring water at the service station instead of walking to the supermarket next door and buying the same thing for $1.50 (and there's nothing wrong with that - just pointing out the non-digital analogy in this logic).

To a rational person it would then seem the solution is to provide an option that allows them to do this. The more business minded people of the world (eg. Apple) have already done this, with great success. If I can explain this in 5 minutes, it can't be difficult to understand. So why is the RIAA still not putting their efforts into this wholesale? Well, I guess you all know the answer to that question.

As for a site going down as 'collateral' for being hosted at the same datacenter as some illegal site, this is definitely grounds to sue for compensation. An online business that relies on its website as a primary sales channel loses all the sales they would have made that day if the site is taken down - this is the reason that SLAs even exist. To take the car analogy up again: let's say you bought a (completely legit) Corvette from a dealer. Later (or earlier), unbeknownst to you, the dealer (had) sold a stolen Corvette to someone else. As a result, your Corvette is siezed by police. Reasonable? I think not.