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The Pirate Bay Files Suit Against Big Media
Join the Pirate Party writes "Having found the necessary proof via the leaked MediaDefenders documents, the Pirate Bay is filing suit against the big record and movie labels operating in Sweden who have allegedly been paying professional hackers, saboteurs and DDoSers to destroy their trackers. They also claim to have filed a police report."
It's taken long enough but it seems these corporations who employ mafia-like tactics will finally get what they deserve. Kudos to the whistle-blowers within MediaDefender, The Pirate Bay for having the guts to file a lawsuit, and Sweden's Communistic copyright laws allowing this happen.
Animal rights activists who hack and deface sites seems to get that label. I'd find it quite hilarious if "Big Media" would be labeled as such too. They'd be in some interesting company.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
With the difference that what The Pirate Bay does, actually is legal in Sweden.
This is like the Amsterdam coffee-shop proprietor calling the cops because someone keeps trying to break into his premises, and stalking his customers.
Remember, The Pirate Bay is doing nothing that is illegal in Sweden.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So what you are basically saying, this is like a doctor calling the police because his drug cabinet was smashed.
Granted, this is also like a slave owner reporting a runaway slave to the police or the citizen who turned in Anne Frank just doing his civic responsibility (Oh hi godwin, how you doing.)
The simple fact is that the law isn't always "right". Some big media do not like swedish law, just as some hard drug users do not like swedish law, or as same slaves did not like eh slave laws etc etc. The problem is that if you then fight that law by disobeying it, you run the risk of the police coming around and talk sternly to you (or if you are black gun you down as you reach for your wallet, somethings never change).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As has already been shown, Piratebay is a legal service (in Sweden) hosting no copyrighted material. Swedish law does not condemn faciltating copyright infringement.
Swedish law does however not really like sabotage, vandalism, unautorized access and other sauch malarkey.
That said, I didn't see that one coming, laughed out loud.
It's about bloody time that someone took big media and smacked them a little for all these strongarm tactics.
Hopefully the media coverage on this will highlight some of the issues, like HOW the media companies think business should be run. If small businesses tried this they would immediately be taken down (in almost any country) for much more serious crimes than copyright infringement.
And please try not to call it "pirating". That's a term coined by the mpaa (if I remember correctly) to try to make it sound really bad. If we, the geeks, are careful to call it what it is, copyright infringement or illegal copying, we can perhaps change public perception of the issues a little.
The ONLY thing that bugs me about thepiratebay is the name. Yes it IS cool but also makes us all look a bit like rebelling teenagers, even those of us who have thought deeply about copyright issues and realised that the system needs fixing to work in the modern world.
Distributing drugs is illegal
Oh goodness me, what am I going to do with all that morphine, fentanyl, diazepam, and ketamine I have under lock and key at my clinic?
Distributing drugs is not ALWAYS illegal.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Copyrights are protected by law. Trackers and checksums pointing to outside sources of copyrighted material are not illegal in Sweden. Yes, they encourage copyright violations. This may be "bad" in the moral sense (depending on your morals, I tend to side more with Trent Reznor myself).
Now, hacking a legitimate (in the legal sense) website is very much illegal and I certainly feel it's immoral. If my next door neighbor put a giant arrow in his yard pointing to my house proclaiming "STEAL FROM THIS GUY!" I'm still not allowed to go burn his house down.
It's like a guy's rented car being slowed down by a speed limiter even though the guy is driving within the speed limit.
No wait, that would be DRM.
Okay how about this:
Imagine there's a public road with lots of houses on both sides. And there's the starbucks coffee shop. The big corporation is selling coffee to the residents every morning, who badly need it. Now some residents need to drive far to get to the coffee shop and in the wrong direction (opposite of work). A guy figures out the formula for his favorite starbucks coffee and decides to open his own specialized little coffee shop at home. Because he has a little house, he can't sell the coffee to many people at once and being low budget has no money to advertise, but some close neighbors who like the same type of coffee are spared the tedious trip to starbucks for getting their fix. Soon many more such coffee shops open, but it's still all garage type, low profile and very few people know where to get their favorite coffee besides starbucks.
Then a smart guy buys a big truck and fills it with lists of the small coffee shops. He drives up and down the road and people who ask are given a list of all the shops that sell their favorite type of coffee so they can pick the nearest to buy the coffee there.
Now less and less people go to starbucks and starbucks likes it not. So they decide to make sure no more formulas are stolen from them. They put up rules for how, where and if you can drink the coffee you bought from them and on your way out you get a retinal scan.
Also starbucks now hires gangsters to force the advertising truck from the road, shoot the driver, flat the tires, jam the road etc...
Today there are many drivers advertising the little coffee shops and secret letter correspondence between starbucks and the gangsters has leaked to the public recently. A pissed off driver who has been a victim of gangster harassment has now called the police and the special execution forces of the justice department.
Making the same coffee as starbucks is illegal, advertising fowhere to buy it is not.
To be continued...
I doubt they'll be making that mistake again.
They'll probably bully the ISP next time.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What if the verdict was wrong? what then? You have just taken away something that can never be given back. A human life. It is more valuable than gold or anything known to man, as nothing can buy you another one.
The legal definition of theft is appropriation of another's property with the intent to deprive that person totally of the use of that property. In other words, I steal your car when I take it, and drive away with no intent to return it. If I take your CD to my house, copy it, and return the CD, I haven't deprived you of any property so totally as to bar your further use of that property. So I haven't committed theft. I may have violated the copyrights on the CD, but not theft.
IAALS.
seriously dude, ketamine has been replaced by numerous less-harmful drugs for literally all of it's applications.
In the United States. You are making an assumption that I am in the USA. I am not.
As for ketamine being "pretty damaging" - lol. You can't learn medicine by reading wikipedia. It has less risk of cardiopulmonary depression than diazepam, has a longer half life than midazolam, has none of the serious depressing/nauseous effects of opioids, and is PERFECT for sedating small children for an hour or so while certain procedures are performed (ultrasound, CT, etc). It's dissociative effect prevent it from being used as a mainstream anesthetic for surgical procedures but for sedation it's great.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
of course not, pirating music and movies costs multinationals money, molesting a child costs them nothing, it's obvious what is more evil.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I just read Slashdot for the articles.