Prosecutor Announces Charges Against Pirate Bay

paulraps writes "Almost a year after a police raid on the Pirate Bay's servers, a Swedish prosecutor has announced that he intends to press charges against the individuals behind the file-sharing giant. They will be prosecuted for various breaches of copyright law, reports The Local. But a Pirate Bay spokesman was defiant, saying, 'I think they feel they have to do it. It would look bad otherwise, since they had 20 to 30 police officers involved in the raid.'"

Comments

huh

[mastershake_phd]

If they are going to press charges, why is the pirate bay still up? Shouldn't the first step be to shut it down?

Re:huh

[compro01]

If they are going to press charges, why is the pirate bay still up? Shouldn't the first step be to shut it down?

you generally need to prove charges before issuing a sentence.

Re:huh

[AmPz]

They did.
The police emptied the entire server hall which hosted the pirate bay. They shut down the pirate bay, and a large number of totally unrelated companies who just happened to have their servers in the same server hall.

"The pirate bay" was restored from backups to new servers (located abroad) a couple of days later. Some of the other companies previously hosted in the server hall had to wait months before their systems were fully up and running again.

Re:question

[Svenheim]

The law doesnt work like that in western Europe. The court reaches a verdict in your favor or disfavor, period. We don't get endless loops of suits and countersuits which doesn't do anything except make a mockery of the justice system.

Re:question

[AmPz]

Of course you can appeal to a higher court.
There are three court "levels" in Sweden. And in some cases, like fundamental human rights and stuff, you can appeal the verdict of the highest Swedish court to the European court.

Re:question

[Jugalator]

The law doesnt work like that in western Europe. The court reaches a verdict in your favor or disfavor, period.

You're wrong, the Swedish Chancellor of Justice has still not wrapped up the work and decided about economical compensations for the large number of computers withheld as part of the investigation. This according to reports related to these news but in a Swedish newspaper.

This matter is more complex since these guys were an ISP and the police had to take a lot of irrelevant hosts with them, belonging to the ISP's customers.

Re:question

[odie_q]

Same thing here in Sweden, as in pretty much every system. First, the case goes to the local court, tingsrätten. If you are unhappy with the verdict, you can appeal to the regional court, hovrätten. From there you can appeal to the supreme court, högsta domstolen, who only take cases they reckon will have bearing on future cases. This particular case might very well end up there.

Juries, however, are only used in cases concerning freedom of speech. In other cases, the local court's (tingsrätten) decisions are made by one or two judges and three or four "nämndemän". These are sort of like jurors, except they are appointed for the duration of a political term (four years) and are typically locally active politicians. The nämndemän and the judge(s) together decide whether the defendant is guilty and what the consequences should be.

Re:Maybe I'm Wrong

[JordanL]

Very few Slashdotters, as far as I can tell, actually endorse piracy outright. Those are the more "community commodity" folks, (socialism and such).

As I guage it there are a few key bones most /.ers have with the whole situation:

• The US flexes copyright enforcement with complete disregard for other countries sovereignty or local government.
• The DMCA, the primary document in the US outlining enforcement of digital copyright infringement, is flagrantly unconstitutional and reads like a rap sheet of big companies that want their own legal concerns codified.
• The RIAA and MPAA have been completely resistant to any changes in their business model and have been attempting to "win" by illegalizing opposing business models.
• The RIAA and MPAA operate as a illegal cartel, benefitting neither the producers or the consumers, only the distributors and financers.
• Most slashdotters concede that regardless of what should be copyright law, or what is, many consumers download illegally as "try-to-buy" situation, and that illegal filesharing actually does translate to sales in some cases, (though we don't have any accurate measurements of this translation).
• In an effort to "prevent" piracy, signifigant man-hours and dollars are wasted on "solutions" which will not stop real pirates and add no value to the product, only increasing the cost to real consumers.
• Many of these piracy measures infringe the consumers fair-use rights under copyright, but due to the size of the corporations and the unconstitutional DMCA, consumers have little recourse.
• • These are just some of the valid concerns which are raised by many slashdotters.
    
    Sorry, we're not a bunch of corporate hating communist hippies, most of us just have the common sense that the corporations involved seem to lack. So don't act like you're morally superior or something... equating the slashdot crowd to the hysterical prepubescent throng that constitutes Digg is a bit... insulting.

Nice to know that

[Whuffo]

Swedish prosecutors play CYA too. A year ago, under the alleged urgings of American media interests, they cleaned out an ISP - seizing all computers located at that site. That put a lot of people out of business for varying lengths of time.

Of course, if there was no law violated by TPB, then this seizure wasn't proper - and the prosecutor would be responsible for the value of the seized equipment, lost wages, etc. So he's looking at a very big downside and the only way out is to make his prior actions fit the legal guidelines.

Even if TPB ultimately walks away from this prosecutor (as seems likely), by forcing the issue now he can postpone the inevitable day when he'll be required to reimburse those he's damaged. Much like SCO; by dragging a losing war out, you can avoid punishment.

Re:Poor choice of name

[boaworm]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay

--
The Swedish public broadcast network, Sveriges Television, cited unnamed sources claiming that the raid was prompted by political pressure from the United States, which the Swedish government firmly denies. Specifically, the claim is that the Swedish government was threatened with WTO trade sanctions unless action was taken against The Pirate Bay.[16] There have been claims of ministerstyre (lit. "minister rule") in connection with this allegation.[citation needed] Ministerstyre -- when a politician pressures another government agency to take action -- is a crime in Sweden.
--

Of course proves nothing, but "Sveriges Television" is about as a reliable source as you can get, it has no commercial interest (no advertisement etc), solely a public service payed by the tax payers.

There were also a lot of strange stuff going on when this raid took place, without the proper backing of the swedish law. At the time of the raid you could only get a search warrant if the presumed crime could lead to two or more years in swedish prison, something a copyright felony did not. Still the raid took place, and now one year later they are not even charging the people with the original presumed crime (copyright infrigement), but rather "preparations to perform copyright infrigment"

Re:Poor choice of name

[init100]

You have anything to back that up. Anything at all. Heck I'll take links to blogs, since that would at least be something. If you have a credible source I'll even apologize.

Is the Swedish national television (SVT = Sveriges Television) credible enough? The article is in Swedish though: United States government behind site shutdown.

Re:P2P That's Out Of This World!

[meringuoid]

Satellites are all very well, but limited for this sort of application for technical reasons. The one that excites me is the prospect of the Antigua data haven: because the US laws on internet gambling constitute an unfair barrier to free trade with Antigua, they're threatening to retaliate by declaring all American copyrights, patents and whatnot entirely void. Best of all, the US won't be able to use its large allies and front organisations as leverage: the EU and Japan are supporting Antigua, and the WTO reckon disregarding US copyrights would be perfectly fair under the circumstances...

Re:Maybe I'm Wrong

[Kjella]

It occurred to me. It also occurred to me that if the Pirate Bay had broken the swedish copyright laws that Sweden would deal with it.

The law is Swedish, but the injured party (the copyrights holders) are in the US so it shouldn't exactly be surprising that they talk to their government, which talks to the Swedish government. If I feel US pollution is causing global warming here, I talk to my government, my government tries to put pressure on the US goverment to enact/enforce laws and regulations to fix it. There's no magical extraterritorial laws at work here. The only question is whether there was some inappropriate contact between the executive branch and the judicical branch. If just done formally correct, Sweden can introduce as many "American" laws as they want by passing them in their own parliament, and then the judicial branch will enforce "American" law. What you can't have is the minister of justice going to the police chief to ad-hoc change the rules.

Is it so hard to do without?

[Stickerboy]

I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next person interested in sane IP, but is it too much to ask, please quit with the inane "Yay! Go pirates! Go copyright infringers! Go!".

There seems to be an easy to spell out way to put the RIAA/MPAA out of business, and that is, REFUSE TO BUY / DOWNLOAD / USE THEIR PRODUCTS. If they get no money, they can't hire lawyers. They can't bribe politicians. In short, they cease to be loudmouthed assholes that matter and just become loudmouthed assholes without a job. The key here is to stop using RIAA/MPAA products.

Unfortunately, I hear too much of, "Yeah! I'm all about hurting the RIAA! They're thugs! Evil incarnate! I'd do anything to see them go down! Right after I download the latest [RIAA-sponsored music]! And perpetuate their popularity and hype... which is exactly what keeps the RIAA/MPAA in business..."

Most of the comments seem to indicate that 90%+ of the entertainment media out there is trash, right? Unoriginal, recycled bullshit? So put your attention and your money where your mouth is. Ditch all of your commercial songs on your iPod. Listen to indie or unsigned music. Because just like Google feeds on pageviews, the RIAA/MPAA companies feed on hype and mindshare. The rampant copyright infringement isn't hurting the RIAA/MPAA one bit from a financial standpoint. (And we all know where the heart of a multinational corp is... the pocketbook.) What it does is reinforce their impression that what they're "guarding" is VALUABLE, and what they need to do in order to increase revenue is to try to get some blackmail, er... enforcement so y'all will go buy it for $1.00 on their sponsored downloading service. (Gee... I wonder where Microsoft got their idea for their "Non-WGA, buy a discounted genuine license today!" model.)

If no one was actually downloading the latest shit-on-a-platter from Justin Timberlake or [name your regurgitated mass-market artist here], do you think the schmucks at the RIAA/MPAA would even care about teh intarWeb?

Just a thought.