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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 would be very interesting if this evidence they propose will be accepted by any judge as legally obtained evidence.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not.
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Distributing drugs is illegal, and distributing music without paying the copyright owner is illegal.
Its because of analogies like yours, that people think that ANY file sharing is illegal.
If you must use an analogy, at least use one that is correct AND appropriate to your audience,
"This is like the car dealer calling the cops because someone vandalized the cars on his lot"
Whether he owned all the cars on the lot or "parked" them there without the car owner's permissions, I don't care. The vandals should still be held responsible.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
It's not the copyright laws as such that are different in Sweden. They subscribe to the Berne convention like (almost) everyone else. The difference is that it is not illegal to run a tracker since it doesn't actually host any files.
I am far from an expert, but I think the basis of this is that copyright falls under contract law in Sweden, as opposed to criminal law. Helping someone commit a crime is illegal, but helping someone break a contract isn't. This is third hand knowledge though, so don't quote me on it.
There might also be a freedom of speech issue involved which would require a change to the foundational (constitutional) laws, which explains why they haven't managed to change the law to harmonize with the EU.
Also, the Pirate Bay team isn't doing any file sharing. Or, well, they probably are, in private. But The Pirate Bay is just an indexing service, like Google or Yahoo - they are not distributing any material that would infringe on anyone's copyright, and what they are doing is with a very high probability legal under current Swedish law.
The prosecutor who is in charge of the investigation associated with the raid against The Pirate Bay in June 2006, when all their servers were confiscated (and the site was up and running again in 3 days), has been looking over the material for almost 16 months now, and has asked the court for time extensions (and received them) twice - apparently he is having trouble finding proof of any illegal activities despite the fact that all the hundreds of thousands of torrents on the site are visible to everyone. His most recent extension expires on next monday, October 1st, at which point he has to press charges, drop the case, or request another extension - guess what he will do?
What's 'wrong' with the death penalty? It certainly sounds a lot better than sitting in a cell for 40-60 years and making people waste millions of dollars on you during that period. I'm all for the death penalty, I also think that anyone given life in prison should be able to *ahem* 'opt out' for sake of money and mind.
How is poisoning someone different from making them miserable for decades?
Whether you're pro or anti-piracy, you have to admit...those TPB boys have balls :)
Saying that, a bit of poking around indicates the US has an extradition treaty with Sweden. Hopefully their government will have balls as well when the IP merchants finally bribe the government to take the kid gloves off...
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
It has worked reasonably well in Sweden, where the think-tank The Pirate Bureau formed shortly after the copyright industry had created the Anti-Pirate Bureau, an organisation consisting mostly of lawyers and paid P2P network infiltrators that tries to track down people distributing copyrighted material. The Pirate Bureau became rather well-known and popular, and was often invited to TV debates on copyright law, and interviewed and asked for comments when newspapers published articles about the subject - and were so successful that the copyright lobbyists adopted a policy a few years ago to refuse debates where representatives from the Pirate Bureau were participating. And then there's the Pirate Party, which didn't get enough votes to take seats in the parliament this time but was treated as a serious candidate by most of the media, despite its name.
When someone is calling you names, it's usually a lot more effective to embrace it than to try and distance yourself from it.
FYI, Someone who has a problem with the drug laws in sweeden or any other country is not necessarily a drug user or "Pro Drug", there are numerous other reasons why drug laws based on prohibition are inherently flawed laws, including the obvious fact that in a free market where there is a demand and willingness to pay high prices someone will step in to supply it, that organised crime in itself creates far more harm to society than the drugs themselves ever could, and that high prices leave addicts in a situation where they are are forced to commit crimes to afford prices inflated by up to 3000% of the costs of production, transport even seizure. That is before anyone even looks at the human rights perspective that one has the right to harm themselves as much as they like provided they do not force harm onto anyone else, one has to remember here that even suicide is legal in most places of the world (although it was outlawed in some places that since repealed that law). Anyway end of that rant, there is plenty of discussion on this topic on sites like this if anyone is interested.
On topic, It seams to me that the facts supporting the merits of a copyright law as it currently stands are quite lacking, especially the often used shout of **AA that "Infringement harms content producers"/"Infringement costs the content producers x millions of dollars a year" etc, it seams to me that these arguments are based on a logical fallacy, namely that persons who commit Infringement would have purchased the information were an Infringing copy not available, which is clearly false, sometimes people who obtain an infringing copy would simply not access the information at all were it not available.
I read an article which suggested that the optimal copyright term is 14 years, there is only one reason I can think of where copyright really would be needed and that would be for example to prevent a person call them alice who has written a manuscript for a book, they show the manuscript to bob who is a publisher, bob copies the manuscript then returns the original to alice refusing to publish the book, however bob then publishes the manuscript in his name not giving any compensation to alice. Although it seams to me that such could be dealt with through the use of a Non-Disclosure Agreement or similar instead of by copyright law.
Other than that I do not really see the need for the copyrighting of information especially music, theatre plays, movies, all three have a valid revenue stream through performance (provision of a service, ie is more than simply information). Even from software money could be made without copyright by the provision of services to users (technical support, online services etc), or by the provision of other materials (physical media, manuals, packaged sets including media/manuals and/or other items). Books obviously have the potential to earn money through sales of physical books. I have heard some argue that physical media sales without copyright could be dented by counterfeit goods, but to the best of my knowledge counterfeiting would violate other laws, trade descriptions for one (namely in this case deceiving buyers into believing the product they are buying was a product of another company).
If this does mean that the amount of money made by content producers decreases then that would simply prove that the free market disagrees with the producers assessment of value, and if that is the case then the law should definitely not be used to artificially inflate the market price of goods, if it were used to this end then it would be no different that price-fixing which is illegal under the anti-trust laws of most every country.
The Pirate Bay is only legal because it claims to only host the trackers for files rather than the files themselves (I guess - IANAL BTW). It's none of their business what the torrents contains, they just supply them. If they start suing people for sabotaging the torrents, it seems they are making the torrent's contents their business. If they truly were only distributing torrent files (as opposed to copyrighted files), then they wouldn't care what happens in the swarm, whether it be normal uploads/downloads, or a hacker sabotaging it. By policing the torrents, they could well be opening them up for crippling counter-suits from copyright holders.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I make ferrari looking cars for me and my friends. Ferrari hires thugs that put bananas in the tailpipe and deflates the tyres of my cars. Then I sue them for this.
Agreed. But:
But sometime when my head is not mush I'd want to try to find a definition between the two above.
Problem is, this gets complicated by drawing the line of "noncombatants".
E.g. for Muslims all of us kafir are by definition combatants (an oversimplification, but it will do for the moment), and so who are we to decide that their attack on the WTC was terrorism? Not as they (or this group of them) score people....:
And specifically:
In that period of total war, civilians producing in the economy were considered to be combatants. And it just so happens that I'm reading the first economic history of Nazi Germany in many decades (says the author), The Wages of Destruction, and hitting Germany economically was critical.
Nazi Germany's strength was severely constrained by its economic situation, and many of their actions make a lot more sense in that light. And it was a nasty interlocking problem.
E.g. whatever the willingness of occupied or Vichy France to make planes for Germany, they were constrained by a lack of refined aluminum. They had ore and smelters, but not enough power. Their and the lowland's coal output was constrained by food, the miners just couldn't get enough to work at full output (normal, civilian level, not wartime).
I've stopped reading for the moment at the point where the author starts explaining why it was integral to Operation Barbarosa that the urban populations of the untermenchen in the soon to be captured East be starved to death, to remove their useless to the Nazi's mouths and free up that food for their Grosseraum in the West. Hitler and company knew they were living on borrowed time, the combined economic power of the British empire and the US would crush them like bugs in short order.
(Unfortunately, Hitler's world view told him that the International Jewish Conspiracy(TM), headquartered (?) in the USA---FDR being its #1 mouthpiece---was fervently working to exterminate Germany after WWI, so it was essential to start this whole mess before they got any further. There are prices paid for world views that don't track reality....)
And that makes things even more complicated. Every day the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was delayed resulted in ... tens of thousands (or so, the number is very large) of civilian deaths in the areas they occupied. In that light, various means including the nuclear bombings look a bit different....
And of those post-eighties exonerations - how many were after the actual executions?
That's why we have an appeals process. And every death row convict gets a shitload of 'em. Show me how many people executed after the lengthy number of appeals and stays, etc. only to be exonerated post-execution, and the we can talk about how shitty the criminal justice system is.
The justice system does not just stop at conviction. There's a lot more to it. People appeal and appeal and that's why these convictions are overturned ten years later. Because someone, or something, comes out. Someone else admits to the killings. New evidence pops up. A witness recants.
The death penalty is wrong because an imperfect system shouldn't be put in control of life and death when criminals can just as easily be separated from society and possibly rehabilitated in other ways.
1) Very little "rehabilitation" takes place in prisons.
2) Keeping someone locked up is quite expensive.
3) The "imperfect system" IS "put in control of life and death" all the time. Every time a murderer is given 5-10 years, then released 'for good behavior' in 4. That murderer goes right back out on the streets, while their victim- surprise- is still DEAD.
If you can come up with an idea that both 1) keeps the violent away from the rest of society and 2) doesn't cost $40,000 per person, I'm all ears.
Actually, I have such a system. It's called 'kill the murderers'.
1) I'm not an American
My apologies. Although I feel my assumption, based on your opinions, was reasonable.
2) I know every well what communism is, having read The Capital myself. I also studied the history of most "communist" countries (which weren't that communist, after all). To a point that what Karl Marx wrote, these days, is referred as Marxism, and not communism, due to the distortion of his idea as implemented on many places. Actually, most of the concepts attributed to Karl Marx were not his own, but really ideas that were floating around for a long time. You can find the base of many of his theories old Greek and Roman texts.
Then why are you trying to disingenuously equate "cannot be owned" with "community ownership" ? They are two quite different things. Ownership implies control. If there is one that everyone should have learnt by now from the Internet, it's that you can't control information once it has been publically disclosed.
You really should take time to understand how much effort, study, and work it took to come up with many of those ideas you want to be free. Unless you think all research should be publically funded, including the study and education for those who are producing that material.
I understand quite well. That doesn't change my opinion. Copyright - especially as it exists today - is an anachronism. Patents are more defensible in principle, but appear to be just as deeply flawed in practice.
One of the few easily defensible aspects of copyright is attribution - that one person's ideas should not be misrepresented as another's - but even *that* falls into a grey area because of "derivative works", and pretty much anything covered by copyright is a "derivative" of an earlier work from before copyright even existed.
There are plenty of ways to make phenomenal amounts of money, even with a substantial overhaul - if not complete elimination - of "IP". Further, given that a greater rate of technological and cultural development is pretty much guaranteed with a larger dissemination of information, the net benefit to society would almost certainly be positive.