Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
This isn't a lawsuit.
It is a criminal charge launched by a prosecutor that only 6 months before the raid said that the Pirate Bay didn't violated any criminal law.
Then, he was called to a meeting with the justice minister and suddenly he orders a raid on the Pirate Bay. A coincidence? I think not.
Since it is illegal for a minister in Sweden to make such orders, it would have been nice to see the justice minster explain this for the parliament committee that handles such suspicions. However, whom is chairman of this committee now? Yes, the former justice minister...
The prosecutor and reps from the Swedish police were invited to Washington DC (and they went there (10 persons) except for this very prosecutor that thought it would look funny if he did) just a month or so before the raid. In Washington they went to US Department of State, US Copyright Office, US Department of Commerce, US Patent and Trademark Office, FBI and some other people.
Politicals messing with the justice system is highly illegal in Sweden.
They cannot "contribute/bribe/whatever you call it" prosecutors to take up certain cases.
However, it has actually already been suggested that american political forces may have influenced some Swedish polticians who then may have suggested that some procecutor should take a look at TPB. This made the headlines because of the legal implications if it is true.
But how do you prove it?
OK A couple facts, Napster was the biggest file sharing system for music for years before it's downfall, The Pirate bay is one of the biggest torrent sites out there.
Let's see what happened after Napster, oh yeah music stopped being shared.
Except on Gnutella.
And Grokster.
And Kazaa.
And Edonkey, and Limewire, and Bearshare.
Oh and on the IRC channels where it was before and after napster, and private FTPs, and some program I remember using in college, and others.
Oh and Bittorrent. No one needed Bittorrent for music before Napster but now it's a major program for it.
Essentially when they destroyed Napster they didn't stop the file sharing they just fractured it to the point where all the shards of File sharing was split up and created 10 times the problem.
It's just an example as these lawsuit doesn't matter for us. The owners of Pirate bay will care, but in the end the destruction of that site will only create new tools and sites for everyone to use to share their warez. The MPAA needs to find substitutes for this, even Pirate bay has said that if they are sued they'll move to a country that will allow them to exist with out being accused of wrong doing. The only ones not getting this is the corporations who think litigation not innovation is the answer.
I am not against paying good companies for their good products, the issue lies when entities decide that you are forced to pay them. Look at the Spanish example, they literally pay an extra tax for each blank CD, flash disk or whatever piece of hardware that might be used to copy one byte of music, and they pay their author organization for all of it, no matter what thing you would pirate, in fact they assume that you want to pirate and just make you paid, it is pretty odd.
I also dislike the fact that companies just reduce the value of their product instead of improving it and they actually expect to get earnings from that, why does DRM exist? It seems it is just to piss off the legitimate customer.
As a matter of fact, many guys who commit "piracy" have already paid a lot of licenses , and would just need the right to use their music, software, and movies in a legit way. With all those things that won't let you play movies you bought to component output, and all those things that come with games that hurt performance of your OS or just the fact that game companies have decided to force you to use the costly original CD all the time with the risk of scratching or even breaking it. Or music that decided it should only work in one operating system.
You can understand what makes some of us applaud when the DRM protection is broken or when a crack/hole to some game's CD protection is found.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
In my particular case, I don't really copy stuff to any great degree, but my purchases of movies and music are way down in large part because of the shambles of copyright law that the corporate world has made, enabled by their bought-and-paid-for representation in Congress.
You just said something I don't really understand. Really, what the 'corporate world' is doing with copyright right now hasn't changed the world, nor copyright laws, that much at all. When I was a kid in, say 1966, people could go downtown and buy a record album. There wasn't widespread ability to reproduce the record in any way, except a few audiophiles with their expensive reel-reel recorders, and the average person just bought vinyl disks to listen to.
That isn't a lot different from the world the 'corporate' folks want today to be like. Except we won't have to go downtown to buy the albums.
The conflict comes in how we, the consumers, and they, the music/film distribution industry, cope with change.
It's ridiculous when people act like the MPAA/RIAA have 'ruined' things. Times changed, and we're all adapting to it. If change is to be defined as 'things are now ruined' then it's the new technology that has 'ruined' things. Though I can still go downtown (actually I have to drive through downtown to the other edge of the small town I live in, to WalMart) and buy an album when I want. So things haven't really changed.
You forgot his "educational" trip to the United States to learn how to deal with those terr^H^H^H^Hpirates. The trip took place about a month before the raid.
When I was a kid in, say 1966, people could go downtown and buy a record album. There wasn't widespread ability to reproduce the record in any way, except a few audiophiles with their expensive reel-reel recorders, and the average person just bought vinyl disks to listen to.
When you were a kid in 1966, Dover Publications was making a good living, and making a lot of science and math students happy, by reprinting rare, long out-of-print math, science and engineering classics, that nobody could get, usually by authors that were long dead, who would have been dismayed to know that their books were unavailable and would have been happy to have their books reprinted and enjoyed by future generations, even if their heirs (if any) didn't get anything from it. I read a lot of those books and I was grateful to Dover for them.
Now there are lots of science classics that were once in print by reprint houses like Dover, that have reverted to copyright limbo, and either aren't available anywhere or are only available as rare books for $200-300 or more apiece. This at a time when the Internet finally has the technical capability to make books available free. I know because I've tried to get books like that, and libraries 500 miles away from me are no longer willing to copy an entire book even if I'm willing to pay them for it. I can't even get the same books I used to read to give to my nieces and nephews. This was further documented in the Supreme Court case of Eldred v. Ashcroft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft.
When you were a kid in 1966 you could buy cheap records of music that had passed into public domain (or from the Soviet Union, which didn't believe in copyright). As late as the 1980s I bought a re-release of a 20-year-old public domain German recording of Wagner's entire 4-opera Ring cycle for $10. The Sonny Bono act has taken that out of the public domain, and it would cost me $100 today.
This is a subversion of the Constitution. The only reason Congress passed the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is that they were bribed by the entertainment industry.
You're worried about crime and being fair and doing the right thing? Doesn't Congressmen taking money from the entertainment industry to pass laws that violate the Constitution count?
Because Sony and BMI wants to peddle their crap music I can't get French, German and Russian texts on vector analysis and biophysics any more. I can't even get cheap classical music, or the now out-of-print old folk music and jazz that I grew up with, or the rock-and-roll of the 50s.
I don't download music, so I'm not arguing from personal interest in defending it. But the entertainment companies themselves are greedy motherfuckers, who broke the law themselves by paying off Congressmen to pass laws that violated the Constitution, and stole our books, music and movies from the public domain.
If somebody sets up a web site to legally distribute torrents outside the influence of their bribery, it serves the entertainment companies fucking right and I don't have any sympathy for them.
If somebody illegally distributes torrents, it also serves them fucking right and I don't have any sympathy for them, because they ripped me off first.
If the billion-dollar entertainment companies go out of business like the carbon paper companies did, it also serves them fucking right. For 75 years they've been living a great life with $100,000-a-year (or $1 million-a-year) jobs, fucking actresses and models, drinking good booze and snorting coke, on a market model based on mass marketing plastic records and movie film. Well, it's all over. You're technologically obsolete. The American manufacturing workers got screwed, so I'm not going to worry about you. We don't need you to tell me what music I'm supposed to like.
If we still had fair, reasonable copyright laws like we did before 1998, that wou