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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.'"
...to be logged by you.
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
If they had named it Liberation Cove or Freedom Files I'm sure their would be none of this nonsense.
Personally, I think FSIAS would have been better...File Sharing Industry Association of Sweden.
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.
Tiamo gets *very* drunk and then something crashes: 4 days
Anakata gets a really bad cold and noone is around: 7 days
The US and Swedish gov. forces the police to steal our servers: 3 days
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
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.
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...
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.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
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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
If you're going to be elitist, it would help to be elite.
> 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.
As I guage it there are a few key bones most
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.
FanFictionRecs.net
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?
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
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