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

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

[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.