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."

Comments

Re:Heh

[toetagger1]

No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not.
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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Heh

[mmcuh]

No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not. 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.

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?

Re:legality

[mmcuh]

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.

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.

Re:Can't Have It Both Ways?

[ScrewMaster]

There's a lot more to this than sabotaging torrents, which is the least of the concerns (most of that activity has been obsolesced by technological measures taken by modern Torrent clients and trackers anyway ... encryption, distributed hash tables, rating systems, etc.) This is about the media companies using illegal means to gain access to confidential information (paying crackers to break into private systems for one) among other juicy bits. The Pirate Bay folks have been saying this for a long time, but didn't have a lot of evidence. Now it seems they've been pretty thoroughly vindicated by the Media Defender leak.

This is officially Very Cool Stuff.