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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.'"
Maybe they have presumption of innocence until proven guilty? Wish we had that over here.
While this case may well end up bad for TPB (unless they can show that the MPAA was involved) it won't stop the next group from starting a TPB-like service. It will take more money than its worth to keep shutting down copyright infringement systems and people who use them.
In the end, DRM does not work, won't work. What the entertainment industries need to do is come up with a better product, better pricing, or both. They are trying to sell content to an audience that has about a 16 second attention span, and they haven't really done anything to deserve that full 16 seconds never mind something to convince people to spend their money in the way that the **AA wants them to. Despite any legislation that might be enacted or in place now, people will keep doing what they are doing. Until the entertainment industry changes their business plan the only thing that they have to look forward to is more court time and cost, more loss of face to the public, ever decreasing revenues.
Whether that is fair or not is now a moot point. It's happening, and all the **AAs of the world seem to be doing is fanning the flames that are lapping at the foundations of their business. There have been a few positive changes so far, but that is far outweighed by the harm they are doing to their own businesses. IWaM(tm) won't ever work, it's a suckers game, not much better for the player than 3 card monty. Sure, TPB might be in for some 'rough seas' in the coming months, but while everyone is busy with that case, more file sharing will continue unabated. Until the entertainment industries learn that they are behaving very foolishly and get on with creating real value products to earn revenue with, they will continue to burn bridges with the public, their customers, and their shareholders.
Good luck to them, they are going to need it to avoid having to learn the 'did you want large fries with that' sentence.
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No, you don't get your TV shows from them, as Pirate Bay is "only" a bittorrent tracker. It would be like saying you get all your take-way food from the yellow pages.
Note to self: get a sig.
I'm not a legal professional in Sweden but AFAIK: if a prosecutor authorizes any action without legal reason they can be found guilty of official miscondut. This means that the state will have to compensate the party being hurt by that action and that the prosecutor may face fines and/or dismissal. However this is quite uncommon in Sweden since prosecutorial occupation isn't an elected position but more of a meritocracy based on convictions and if someone oversteps their boundries they're effectivly cutting their professional career short (and there isn't much of a political career to be made by being a legal professional here).
In this case I suspect that they prosecution is trying out some rather uncharted legal territory in Sweden (the laws on infringement changed a few years ago and there haven't been that many cases) and if he/she fails then it will not count be much of a black mark but if there is a success then it will be feather in his/her hat.
(It should be noted that the law in Sweden is a Civil Law system variation and does not put anywhere as much weight in precedents as a Common Law system and probably because of that there is less drive to redefine previous judgements)
From the Constitution: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries Current copyright law does nothing to prevent original authors and inventors from profit seeking businessmen.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Heh...I'm one of those people who don't buy anything from the RIAA or MPAA (or whatever they're called) but also don't pirate from them. You're absolutely right in that today's music and movies are very uncreative, but that started happening long before pirating became big enough to make creativity more risky. The simple fact is that the current music/movie industry has become too bloated to produce anything really good, baring a few exceptions (and by few I mean probably about 5-10 per month, which is a tiny percentage). The gaming industry is starting to get there too sadly enough.
The problem with music/movies isn't that everyone's pirating them and so no one's paying, it's that no one's watching/listening to them and so no one's paying. The last 3 movies I've been too (all within a week of release and pretty medium hype levels) haven't even come close to filling the theaters. The industry is just too bloated and until it cuts itself down again it's going to be bleeding money from the people who just don't care about it and have found a new hobby, piracy is just the excuse because they refuse to believe that Barbie's Magical Horse Adventure The Movie II won't sell big bucks even if no one pirated it...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
> especially since the GPL relies on copyright law
...
Yeah, we see the FSF lobbying for copyright extension all the time. Face it, in the eyes of the FSF, copyright is an evil which they have decided to pervert for good.
> Am I alone in actually paying the programmers, musicians, and directors for their work?
No, I pay them directly, it's just the (big) labels which don't get my money. Of course, this seriously limits the kind of media I watch and listen to, but I'm not a big media consumer, and there's a lot of interesting indie content out if you look for it.
> as studios are forced to rely on tried-and-tested money-makers because piracy makes risky investments not worth the cost?
> Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same
Frankly, judging by how they treat the artists, I have the impression that they feel any jerk they pick off the street can be marketed into the next big hit. And because they are most likely using research on the current market preferences to decide what to push, it's no wonder that their product evolves very, very slowly.
And yes, I am on the side of The Pirate Bay, considering that what they do is, as far as I know, perfectly legal in Sweden.
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. It would NEVER occur to me that if someone in Sweden broke an American law that the Swedish government would prosecute them for it. Does that mean that whenever I see someone spit gum out on the sidewalk I can cane them because that's the law in Singapore?
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