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Pirate Bay Gets a 4,000-Page Complaint
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Swedish prosecutors appear to be close to finally pressing charges against The Pirate Bay, having served them with 4,000 pages of legal papers. While this might appear bad, the administrators have already moved some of the servers out of the country, so Swedish prosecutors can't shut it down, even if they want to. Moreover, the people of Sweden are decidedly on their side, with the Pirate Party, which is sympathetic to TPB's cause, being one of the top ten political parties in the country. Still, this looks like a dirty trick on the part of the prosecutors — like they're dumping all of this on the defendants in the hope that they won't have enough time to sort through it and defend themselves. For comparison, the second-biggest murder case in Sweden required only 1,500 pages."
Don't read any of the complaint.
When they ask you to enter the plea, you say:
"Oh, we thought we were members of the US Congress faced with a piece of legislation. Dont tase me, bro."
Worked for me.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The second biggest murder case required 1500, how much did the biggest require?
Video Production Support
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property...but I have three stories on Slashdot's front page.
Muahaha (mine is an evil laugh).
Shouldn't this be posted under 'Ask Slashdot', in order to mobilise the world's best legal minds?
they could have been smart and used recycled iPhone bills for the paper. 3 of them, anyway.
They should have bought that island
788652 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 19 x 1153
So, how many pages for the biggest murder case in Sweden?
Murder's a pretty simple issue compared to copyright. I don't know about the Swedish legal system, but if the prosecution dropped 4000 pages of paperwork on a defendant right before some deadline in the US system, the defendant's lawyers would ask the judge for more time, and get it (unless the fix was in).
I hope they put it on their legal page. Would be quite hilarious having all 4000 pages available on their site.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
If I was the judge, I would say call me in 5 years after I read all 4000 pages.
I'm wondering if it is possible to post the whole thing on the internet and get help and input from people on the internet, maybe not legal?, is there someone here on slashdot that knows something about swedish law?
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
It's not to hard at the same time to selectively focus on stuff that's important since obviously in 4000 pages, not all of it is. When you think about it, who has time to write that many pages?
Regardless of how they made it, the court should throw it out as a waste of everyone's time.
Assuming that Pirate Bay's fans include more that a few legally ept people, this 4,000 page document could be distributed for scoring, summarizing, and response. If a 1,000 people each read only 40 pages, than each page would be reviewed by 10 different sets of eyes.
I could imaging publishing the 4,000 pages as a Wiki and recruiting "editors" to analyze the document and mount a response. (Hopefully this would not attract too much Slashdot-style IANAL legal advice)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
yes, no, mabye, fud, whatcouldpossiblygowrong, haha
Parlay? *grins*
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
Can you please unbreak Slashdot? The new comment system is terrible. It takes dozens of clicks to load a full comment tree and then it's slow and unwieldy and won't let me sort in a useful manner.
...who has time to write that many pages? This is nothing but ignorant speculation on my part, but I'm guessing that it's a large team of American and Swedish lawyers under the employ of the MPAA who wrote most of this up and delivered it wrapped it up for the Swedish prosecutors.He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
They'd already be used to this crap!
The Socialist Party USA's presidential candidate came in 8th place in 2004, in terms of the popular vote.
Of course, that only amounted to 10,837 votes, or 0.009% of the total.
In Sweden's 2006 general election, The Pirate Party received the 10th most popular votes, or 0.63 (just below "The Feminist Initiative")
"Top ten political party" doesn't mean a thing, and TPB are clearly in violation of the law, and will likely face all sorts of penalties for moving their operations out of the country. Whether or not the law needs to change might be another issue, but I don't think there's any debate here that what they're doing is illegal...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Oh, I get it. Submitter is a Pirate Party Pundit (ha ha! see what I did there?). Nothing like an objective source.
Sorry pal, you can pretend all you want, but even in Sweden a "top ten party" shouldn't impress anybody.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
That is one bankers box. Not many lawyers would be intimidated by ten bankers boxes these days.
Send back a 20,000 page vague summary reply.
1. There's little, if anything, the prosecutors can do to TPB.
2. The vast majority of the Swedish people sympathize with them, if not are down right on their side.
3. Their name and "product" will gets tons of new airtime at now charge to them (it's happened before).
If you ask me, getting sued is the best thing that may happen to The Pirate Bay since the invention of broadband!
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Criminal cases, murder in particular, tend not to involve a whole lot of paper. In fact, relatively little evidence is ever admitted. I don't know if this is a criminal or civil procedure (or if Sweeden has different distinctions) but IP litigation tends to involve tons of paper. Let me tell you, I'm a paralegal and I printed some 2000 pages today alone. A major case can involve a couple million pages. Really. 4,000 pages is actually 2-3 normal sized boxes worth.
Enough said.
This article, linked from TFA, is interesting, and was written BY a member of the Swedish Parliment:
http://sigfrid.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/decriminalize-file-sharing/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Murder's a pretty simple issue compared to copyright.
That's true. Most murder cases can be proved in a single 18 minute sitcom slot but the infinite losses caused by PIRATES of Imaginary Property can never be explained so easily outside of soundbites like "pirate" and "thief". These soundbites must be repeated, Shining style, over 4,000 pages of manually typed pages to even begin to understand the nature of the current case.
mechanical turk to the rescue, attn: all attorneys, read this page of legalese.
At 4000 pages, it's probably really redundant, e.g. they printed a few pages worth of boilerplate for a bunch of torrent files on the site or something. That's kind of how patents work too, and once you figure out the list comprehension it's pretty quick to read.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Is that complaint available over BitTorrent yet?
Multi-party systems are more prevalent in Europe.
So you have to wield the mouse a little, boo-hoo. The mousephobia of coder geeks is embarrassing in this day and age. You're probably browsing Lynx, anyway.
I say Slashdot is not broken enough. More mouse clicks, please.
don't drop the soap when you go to jail dude. oh, on second thought, you might like it. fucking thief.
Heh, yeah. That's like saying that the Green Party here has mass popular support because its in the top 10.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Apparently Microsoft isn't the only unpopular U.S. entity buying votes in Sweden.
expandfairuse.org
2008 will be the year for Linux! You wouldn't write that summary with Word. Even with a Vista capable machine!
.
I heard the rough draft was only 1,000 pages, so they double spaced, used a 16 point courier font, and increased the margins to 1.5". Just like my term papers.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
You can't "selectively focus" on documents where the author is actively trying to hide things from a casual reading.
The courts have to give reasonable time to read 4000 pages and understand them and make a case.
You cannot just hand 4000 pages and then the next day appear in court. That would be an unfair trial.
They shut down napster and I said nothing. Then they killed allofmp3 and I said nothing. Now they have come after thepiratebay and.. Wait! Now they're fucking with my pr0n god dammit!!
This isn't America, where only two parties matter.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
I would have just replied "Sorry, we can only read ODF, what us being communist hipppy pirates and all"
Or they could just torrent the pages out. Put it on their torrent servers at 200 paged a pop and let 20 lawyers decipher it. Maybe dropping it to 100 pages and 40 groups of paralegals donating time to 20 layers or something. Either way, they should be able break it down into a manageable list of complaints with associated evidence.
This could be another online defense escapade like with groklaw.
The article states there are 700,000 pages of documents.
Cut and paste;
"The cost of the investigation stands at SEK 350 million, EUR 38 million or USD 45 million as of February 25, 2006.[12]
The total number of pages accumulated during the investigation is around 700,000.[13]
The reward for solving the murder is SEK 50 million.[14]
The truth shall set you free!
At the moment Sweden has 7 parties in parliament. 4 out of these are in a very narrow coalition government which won the last election by about 1%. The pirate party got 0.63%. The limit to get seats in parliament is 4%. They have more members than the green party , which HAS seats in parliament. If Sweden can prohibit public funding for research on nuclear power due to the demands by the Greens, then I can very well imagine that a party which has even more members can be politically influential.
I mean, that's just crap for evidence. What is that? Like one MP3?
by how sympathetic the slashdot crowd is to places like pirate bay.
I'll say, I've used to website in the past. It's a great website. But, let's not kid ourselves, it is breaking real legitimate laws.
There's a certain crowd that believes that piracy is somehow noble. This is nonsense. It's not the worse thing in the world, but it is definitely a crime. Copyright violation is a violation of someone's property rights. It might not be as bad as stealing someone's car, but it is stealing, and people that make piracy their business are still criminals.
Additionally, as a software developer those are *my* property rights that are being violated some of the time. If I want my software to go out as freeware or open source, I'll do so, but no one has the right to just take something of mine for free that I only offered them for sale. That's just theft.
Now, people will make arguments that I benefit from piracy because it "spreads the word" about my awesome software. Indeed, this may be true. However, whether I distribute my software for free is my own choice and it is still a violation of my rights if you make that choice for me.
It isn't enough justification to say you were "acting in the artists best interests" when you downloaded their music. The issue isn't who's benefiting, it's who's property rights are being violated. We don't live in a society where you can just do anything to anyone else without their permission if you judge it to be "in their best interest." Consent is required.
iPhone bills were that large for about one month. As humor goes, that was pretty weak.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Excuse me, you must be new here...
Let me show you the way out...
Prosecutors represent the public. If they have evidence against somebody, they are obligated to use all of it--not to half-step. That's their duty to the people they serve. The idea that authors should have no rights in the work they create is so obviously bad policy that it deserves no argument. The only real question is HOW MUCH control over their product the authors should have. I think that the recent copyright amendments go too far, but the pre-amendment amendments were quite adequate. If you strip authors of their copyright, then their work will become the commercial property of those with the best distribution system--the Sammy Glicks of the world (see "What Makes Sammy Run" by Budd Schulberg). That would suck so massively. I would much rather see the creator profit from the creator's work. Spend your efforts arguing about free broadband distribution available to all. That's a much more worthwhile effort than trying to strip incentives away from creative people. It's a question of balance.
TPB is like Obi-fucking-Kenobi -- if you strike them down they will become more powerful than you can imagine.
andAh, enlightening. Apparently not only is the IFPI swimming against the political views of almost all of Sweden, but they are running out of time, too. Thus, the prosecutor is still continuing, despite the magnitude of his earlier failure; it's the last chance, for him, and his backers, to justify their actions. It reeks of desperation, and probably won't get them very far.
The best mixed martial arts training in Boston - www.redlinefightsports.com
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
I believe the author was citing Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. Specifically, his Copyright regime vs. civil liberties keynote address. As popularized by the article mentioned in the recent slashdot post Interview With Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge
In this address Falkvinge stated while the Pirate Party is only the tenth largest party in Swedish politics. This was a first for a newly formed party and support is rapidly growing (especially under the youth demographic.)
His presentation showed a graphic pie chart with the Pirate Party as a wedge between the two equal divided dominant parties. Who is Prime Minister is quite often determined by the swing voters and Falkvinge states the Pirate Party, and thus it's platform, is a dominant player in that area.
I'm pretty sure about it. (Living in Sweden..)
They simply don't have any copyrighted material on their site. The raid and prosecution against them was
HIGHLY controversial, since it was carried out due to political pressure (from the USA). In fact, you could
argue that it played a part in the fact that the then-ruling Labor party (Social Democrats) lost the election later the same year.
It took political pressure to start prosecution, because the police and district attorneys simply pointed out that they likely weren't doing
anything illegal.
Another thing that people need to know is that Swedish authorities prosecute cases that they don't expect to win all the time. They do this when they feel there's a need to establish legal precedent. And this (serving up torrents) is indeed an area without much legal precedent in Sweden.
Right, because the "mafiaa" will just send out a couple of low-lives to get rid of the "problem." People sharing with other people isn't "organized crime" even if the sharing occurs over the internet. Although you bring up an interesting point regarding the record companies: Is bringing civil legal action against a potentially innocent party fair? Especially since reaching an out-of-court settlement is always cheaper than proving your innocence in court.
When guilt is cheaper than innocence the law is at fault, not the actions of the victim.
Torrent?
The major copyright holders with the resources to enforce their claims have demonstrated a complete lack of interest in giving me any reasonable rights and indeed are actively seeking to take what's left away. For example, lobbying to redefine format shifting of music I bought "a crime" (says who? Did I sign a EULA when I bought the CD?) and obtaining IP rights by stealth by changing the terms on sites like MySpace and Facebook for anything I care to upload to such sites.
Yes, the ethics are debatable, but I am not surprised that the majority of people might side with TPB in the face of such avarice. Think of all those records execs being deprived of their cocaine!
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Well as long as you admit it's ignorant...
Disclaimer: Disregard the above post.
I find the "mafiaa" tag amusing given that the Pirate Bay is actually organized crime.
No it's not, that's the whole point. Nothing TPB is doing is a violation of the law.
distribute the task and let's all compile a 12,000 page rebuttal...
for glorious death! for rohan!
a party to get over 4% of the votes to get into parliment here in sweden. Currently there are 7 parties who passed that limit and thus are included in the votes, 4 of those have formed a coalition and are the ones with the political power at the moment. The pirate party got 0.63% of the votes of the votes in the election, which is not bad for a party that only existed for 9 months prior to the election. I think the next election in 2010 will decide their fate.
They are also not the only party in favor of reducing the effects of copyright and legalising file sharing. The green party has this on their agenda, and just last week a group of people within the second largest party spoke out in favor of it.
Personally I don't think the pirate party will ever join parliment, but their politics will get the attention of people, and it might change the attitudes of other politicians.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
I'm always willing to admit ignorance when appropriate. The only insight I have into the generation of this legal document is from TFA and the history of actions from the MPAA. Apart from that, I know nothing. But, based on what I know, it seems like reasonable speculation. Do you have further information? Do you happen to be a Swedish lawyer?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
by corporations, their lawyers, and the congresscritters in their pocket (sonny bono)
what was originally intended as a modest incentive to create works has been perverted to apply to ownership of material well beyond any reasonable understanding of public versus private domain
drug companies make billions with patents on drugs that expire in a time period an order of magnitude smaller than what copyright has bloated into
furthermore, copyright was created when it was easy to enforce: cassette or cd duplication and distribution is a slow moving operation, and therefore easy to target and shut down
what do we have now? i can point and click and 10,000 people on 5 continents have access to my entire music collection
push comes to shove: morally defunct copyright laws meet poor technologically astute music hungry teenagers
i'm sorry, but your going to have to take your high holy moral outrage and go sit over there with the disgruntled chimney sweeps and the steamship captains: technological progress has come and rendered your understanding of the morality of the situation defunct
there is nothing within natural morality or reason or religious text that somehow asserts or implies that copyright is moral pact. what it is is an economic agreement that made into law in another technological era. that era has passed, and so has the economics. so you have no real insight or moral sense to your position, you simply have an antiquated sense of how reality works now. so adapt, or allow your views, as written above, to be irrelevant
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'll gladly help. Oh wait, this has to do with Swedish law that I know nothing about. I think your pool of helpful Swedish lawyers is smaller than you think.
Unless there's a subscribers-only story, it's only 2.5 or so. One of them was actually an amalgam of two submissions and it only used a little of mine, and kdawson (who posted all of them) rewrote the one. But I'm not complaining, I only submitted five stories today and I don't much care about getting attribution. I'm just some nobody, which is why I point the link in the name to the EFF support page, one of the GNU essays, USC 17, or whatever seems most fitting for the story. There wouldn't be any point in contacting me, after all. It is nice to see that I have my own tag now, though.
Incidentally, feel free to borrow the name as much as you like. The interesting thing about not using a registered account to publish this is that anyone is free to copy the name. You could consider that one of the ways of living what I believe. I'd seed my own software on TPB, too, but I haven't published anything that wasn't free to begin with and one of my more important works was note just given away, but released anonymously to boot.
or maybe it's all the bittorrent programs .exe files rendered as ASCII rofl. That'd be a real page turner I gotta say.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
They're making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation. They have categories on their web site that cannot possibly be for legitimate material (e.g. XBox 360). Is that legal in Sweden? Guess we'll find out.
Either way, my point still stands. Despite another commenter's opinion, I've been here for a long time, and I've seen the way the goalpost moves. Years ago when this whole anti-copyright fiesta started out, the prevailing line was that file sharing was really for legitimate purposes. Everyone would post comments about how many indie bands they'd found with Napster and how they'd never, *ever* downloaded anything illegal. People said the RIAA should go after actual pirates. They said that musicians, not industry bodies, should determine what to do with their works.
And what happened? Metallica stood up and suddenly what artists wanted wasn't so important. The RIAA started going after actual pirates and Slashdot threw a fit. News flash: college students are not helpless innocent victims. I went to RIT, the piracy capital of the northeastern US. I've downloaded more than my share of music and movies. I still do, now and then. I know what goes on. First, it was "sell cheap music online!". Then Apple did, and the line became "it's too expensive! make it cheaper!".
It's the same pattern over and over. What people want is free stuff, and they're perfectly willing to keep shifting their principles so that the current legal offering is just unacceptable enough to "justify" downloading. Do you really believe that if copyright terms were reduced and the RIAA stopped screwing over artists that people here would stop defending piracy?
What are people saying these days? "It's a dying business model". "People will make stuff for free". "Musicians make most of their money on tour". It doesn't matter whether it's legal or illegal, ethical or not. The line was drawn the moment someone downloaded that first MP3 off of a shady FTP site a decade or more ago. Slashdot wants free stuff. That's the truth, like it or not.
And you know what? If that's the case, it's fine by me. Like I said, I'm not innocent in this whole affair. But please, just admit it. Don't pretend it's about politics. Don't pretend it's about justice. Don't pretend it's about feeding starving artists. Just say that you want free stuff, and don't pretend that you have the moral high ground. Because you know what the real moral high ground is?
Not having any of their media at all.
Visit the
"n Sweden's 2006 general election, The Pirate Party received the 10th most popular votes, or 0.63 (just below "The Feminist Initiative")"
;)
Heh, Jane Fonda even went to Sweden in order to support the "Feminist Initiative". While the party had a lot of media attention during the campaigns, I think the voters took them for what they are, feminists, and din't vote for them. Maybe it was a bad name choice?
My Rules of Acquisition You MAY acquire a copy if: 1. it is not available in your State or Country. 2. the local price, ignoring taxes, is more than 50% higher than the Amazon US Dollar price 3. the TV show is on free-to-air (network) television in a prime time slot, heavily hyped, then shifted to an 11:30pm slot. Either the show is good or the show is crap - make up your mind before wasting my time. You MUST buy a legitimate copy if 3. You enjoy it to the point of watching it more than once. 4. You recommend the series to your friends and family. Rules 1 & 2 are about punishing Copyright Holders for being idiots by treating their customers like idiots. Rule 3 & 4 are about rewarding Copyright Holders for making enjoyable content and showing some respect to their customers.
You are quite correct as to my source on that. Thank you for providing a proper citation. Even if you go through a few rough drafts, apparently my grammar isn't that great when I'm slacking off from work and submitting various stories to Slashdot :/
That part wasn't kdawson's fault, it was mine.
4000 pages of crap, chop down some more trees
Have you tried asking nicely?
No, I'm not kidding. What I'd do is post a comment to the torrent with that software saying that if people liked it, they can support you at http://www.caravelgames.com/ You might be surprised, I imagine some people would support you as a result. Those who won't wouldn't anyhow.
Gangsters in the RIAA tell me that my computer and my MP3 collection are National Security Issues.
Gangsters in the USA House of Reps and the USA Senate sell my independence and my privacy out to the highest bidder.
Now a nation of independents 3000 miles away from the USA is supposed to feel bad because the Gangsters whole mode of control is failing?
I have this to say: Take that shit to trial, BITCH!
The tragedy of the human condition is that empathy is, by definition, impossible.
> You have to be joking. You really think most people have that kind of integrity?
From what I've seen, people's opinion on such matters is quite often based on themselves. I don't know whether "most" people have it, but I know people who do.
That said, convenience (especially due to DRM problems), availability and selection tend to be the points where most media loses out to pirated products. Price certainly can be a serious problem, too, but mostly for those things that the average person can't reasonably afford (think Photoshop).
TL;DR?
And I wouldn't consider scattermash of people all over the globe sharing their files without coordination "organized" either.
Bot Assisted Blogging
look im a fan of ron paul; which is surprising to some because normally I vote democrat... the key reason being he's actually a republican where as the republicans who generally surface from the party arent republicans in actuality. that aside; how can you say he's doing well? The people coming in thrd or fourth aren't doing well either.
this highlights again the reason that we should convert to runoff elections; to actually capture what the people want and credit those who dont win an election properly. People may say "a vote for RP is a vote that could be better used to push X over Y" and the problem is that then RP or whoever loses out.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Put a cover page on it that says "Harry Potter and the Torrents of Azkaban" by JK Rowling. Run it through a document feeder and post it on The Pirate Bay. Wait about ten to twenty hours, then check Wikipedia's plot synopsis. Problem solved!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You make it sound like being one of the top ten political parties is something. It's not.
Looking at the pirate partys web page, they clearly state (on the first page) that they have roughly half the number of members as the green party. Furthermore, the green party got 5.24% last election being the coalition party with least votes, while the pirate party got 0.63%, behind SD and FI which got 2.93% and 0.68% respectively. So saying that the pirate party was close to a seat in parliment is not really true at all.
The swedish torrent portal "The Pirate Bay" was convicted for "facilitating copyright violations" in the court yesterday, but the compelling case caused a surprising co-conviction - all roads and cars were banned, as were bikes, pavements, shoes and the use of hands for any purpose, as the case made it clear that despite many obvious innocent uses, all these things were almost always part of many serious crimes, including murder and terrorism, just like The Pirate Bay was part of many copyright violations as shown by the procecution, and as they made a convincing argument about facilitating crimes, the extensive ban was unavoidable...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
I didn't realize I had come up so far as to be called a "pundit"--I've always figured I was just a nobody. What do you mean by an "objective" source, anyhow? Is it now a matter of opinion that the complaint was 4,000 pages or something? Or are people who have opinions supposed to pretend that they don't so that you'll respect them more when they come out in support of what they believe?
FWIW, Sweden isn't like the USA. It's true, the Pirate Party didn't get that many voters, but you would be mistaken to believe that they had no influence on Swedish politics. Not everyone voted for them, but it's hard to get broad support behind a single-issue party. They have plenty of sympathizers in the mainstream parties, enough that they've gotten quite a few politicians to speak out on their side. Then again, you should probably have someone Swedish explaining this to you, like the Pirate Party's leader. Hell, I'm not even in Sweden.
Anyhow, I'm just a nobody who slacks off at work and submits various stories to Slashdot. It's not like it's hard. Read some tech news, try for a catchy or slightly flamebait title, write a half-decent (or less) blurb, and submit anything the least bit interesting that wouldn't be a dupe and you'll get more than a few. Then you, too, can be a lame-ass minor Slashdot celebrity. Even an idiot can do it, and more than a few have. If I submitted everything from an account, I'd almost be on the top 10 list by now.
Even though I'm a nobody, I can advocate those things I believe in, and go against those I don't.
That web page also says the number of documents in the trial has tripled over the last six months.
Is there a link to the .torrent?
Surely there are more then 20 lawyers not working for the prosecution. There are probably 20 lawyers or lawyer wannabes who would actually vote for the pirate party and somewhat support their actions. I say this not because lawyers tend to want confusion and litigation but because of the freedoms the pirate party seems to be championing.
In 2006, it appears that they had 9,000 registered members and receives something around 34,918 votes in the election. Surely within that pool there would be some legal staff of not full blow attorneys. And if these numbers sound small and unconvincing, just think about how they gathered that much support by announcing their start and tackling an election 9 months later in the same year. If there is a 1 in 1000 chance of someone who voted for them being a legal clerk or lawyer then that would be 34 extra eyes helping the main legal team.
Labeling something as Free and then legitimizing it with a political party seems to have an effect that can't easily be explained.
They are a search engine. They are not providing any copyrighted material, just pointing out where to find it. Just like Google.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Someone should modify SCIgen to generate random legalese :)
"....They're making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation......"
So how do we get to Piratebay? Search Google. So now Google is also making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation.
Some people will just copy for free, other people want better ways to buy and access media. And yes, they want more realistic pricing.
The reality lots of people ignore is that copyright is a monopoly so it allows the copyright holder to abuse their position.
Example: We will be bombarded by ads for movie X. I live in Europe and speak English. I am supposed to wait a year after they tease me? Because they are a monopoly I have no choice.
I travel all the time. I hate DVD's I want digital downloads. I do not want HD or even full size copies. I would pay 5 ish Euros a pop. But you know what? I would spend about 15 - 20 Euros a week on movies.
Now I spend zero. Because the monopolists believe that they can use their monopoly to strangle the market and restrain the ways in which people can access as well as when people can access their product.
The problem is I like movies, but these "studios" are the basic ball game. I am ready and waiting to pay.
The reality is that the studio's would perhaps want to make places like piratebay a commercial partner.
People have X amount of budget.
In the 90's I used to buy 20-30 CD's a week. Now I cannot afford that rate. Most of the music I bought on CD I already had bought on Albums. Now I am wiser and poorer the whole music pricing business leaves a bad tastes in my mouth.
People who produce are obligated to understand that the price of duplication is zero. The cost is zero. Now if I buy downloads they charge me CD prices and they can not be bother to even let me know who play on the album.
SO basically the media industry has been shitting on customers for years because as monopolists they can. I actually believe Piratebay is a good way to put pressure on them to change.
Is that legal in Sweden? Guess we'll find out.
/. about it every time it comes up. Between that and watching the occasional TV show like when I miss an episode of Top Gear, that's as much 'piracy' as I get through.
.gifs or some other thing that isn't actually illegal in the US (or whereever). Imagine the fuss that would get kicked up, even here - after it came back up - which is a place most would consider extremely (in the good sense) liberal. Imagine how Bill O'Reilly would react? The man would go thermonuclear on national television calling for our heads.
I'm of the impression that just linking to copyrighted material (which is all bittorrent trackers do) is perfectly legal in Sweden.
Now let me go on record as saying I rarely, if ever, pirate anything I have no intention of buying. You could call my bittorrent activity a sort of enhanced version of iTunes' preview feature, because a 30-second sample of a 1-minute intro really isn't enough to do justice to a 5 or 6 minute song, for example. If I like what I hear having listened to the album, I buy it on iTunes - I have an iPod and less than 5 computers and I don't lend music to my friends, so their DRM has never been an issue for me, despite the screaming from the rafters on
Now that's out of the way, let me explain why this story annoys me, someone who has never actually used TPB (I didn't like the interface rather than any other moral objections, but I digress):
It annoys me that the Swedish authorities are wasting time and resources to pursue people in the interests of foreign corporations. Not Swedish people, not even Swedish companies, but foreign corporations. 65 police officers charging in and confiscating the equipment, right down to faxes about the air conditioning, of an ISP demonstrably doing nothing illegal under Swedish law is rediculous, forcing the company's legal advisor to submit a DNA sample despite doing nothing illegal under Swedish law is a massive invasion of privacy, and the ongoing legal furore, of which this is just the lastest aftershock, showed off the infuriating smug cockiness of the **AAs, and the fact that they clearly think they have the power to change Sweden to their interests, and not the interests of it's people.
Now, I'm not Swedish, I'm British, but that doesn't mean I can't find the **AA's behaviour reprehensible. Did your school ever cut the funding for the Math Club (or whatever nerd club you belonged to - if you didn't belong to any, imagine you did, just for the sake of argument) and give it to the jocks for more ass-slapping practice? It didn't benefit you, it didn't benefit the school in any meaningful way, but I bet those guys were smug as shit that they got things changed the way they wanted, regardless of whether or not it was good for you or anyone else. Now replace the jocks with the **AA, and the Math Club (or whatever) with Sweden. Annoying, isn't it?
Now imagine a British company was trying to get... I don't know... Slashdot shut down, and being extremely cocky about it, because by linking to the Pirate Party website they are encouraging piracy, or for having their site use an illegal amount of
Now, as you say, it might annoy most people because if TPB goes down, they'll no longer get free stuff. But I'm annoyed for the reasons outlined above. If what TPB was doing was illegal in Sweden, or if the Swedes were carrying out these raids as a piece of fair diplomacy in dealing with the US, then that wouldn't trouble me - if you will insist on sailing close to the wind, don't complain when things go awry - but it's the fact that we have smug corporate talking heads attempting to bully entire governments with statements like "It is not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation as a place where utter lawlessness is tolerated" that really annoys me.
That, and encouraging Swedish politicians to break Swedish law ('Ministerstyre'
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
I am also disturbed by the depths to which the RIAA will go to. They are taking away Fair Use Rights. They have been stealing for ages from the authors. They have been ruthlessly controlling the distribution channels.
And the current power struggle is not about them fighting for the rights of authors, but they are fighting for the control of the distribution channels. They can go to any limits for this control, even to the limit of making 1984 a reality.
Research on nuclear power is prohibited in Sweden since the referendum in 1980 where over 75% of the population participated. All parties said that they would respect the outcome, and the ban on nuclear power research was a way to strengthen the decision. Any party that would like to lift the ban will have their credibility questioned.
EUR 38 Million, if it was used in the Hospital System, or a preventative health program, could have saved 100's of lives and prevented much pain and suffering. DPP is indirectly killing people - something they should not do.
Its a no brainer, sack the people who squandered scare public resources, and cut the prosecutions budget by 38Mil EUR - clearly they have too much money, and no brains.
The can waffle, but someone needs to pull the pin on this one, and the prosecutor just needs to come in and ask for a 1 year adjournment, as the coffer is empty.
Well, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the pirate bay if they weren't making a shitload of money from advertising (~$50k/month, iirc).
Sorry to hear about the woes with your game - looks interesting, I'll check it out. As a "creative-type" myself, I wish you luck selling it.
Since this is probably the biggest piracy law suit ever in Sweden (not that I really know anything about the stuff going on in Swedish courts), wouldn't it make sense to compare the amount of paper with the biggest [insert category here] case, instead of the second biggest?
Please note that according to the blog of one of the founders behind TPB (brokep) most of the pages were either blank or only had paging number printed on them. So it's not 4000 pages of text. Most likely a lot less. Blog here. Sorry, Swedish only.
...some people just don't feel the price you charge for the premium content is worth it?
Can you also be sure that people haven't gone on to buy the content after anyway?
Are you sure your page isn't putting people off purchasing?
Can you be sure the people downloading it would've bought it even if they couldn't download it free?
The problem is you're stuck in the RIAA type mindset that if something is available for download illegally that you're definitely losing money as a result, this is absolutely not necessarily the case. Its much more likely it makes no difference to your income and best case may even improve it.
The only real problem I can see is that it may be frustrating knowing people are enjoying your product for free but you have to ask yourself why you developed it in the first place in that case, was it for the fun of developing it? was it so other people could enjoy it or was it just to make money? It's only the latter case here where it would be a problem.
As for pricing I'll cite a personal example, I hate paying £39.99 for a XBox 360 game, I simply will not pay that much as I don't feel it's worth that much. I will however gladly buy them when they drop to the £14.99 - £29.99 range. As such, it's not that I'm unwilling to buy things, they just have to be priced in an acceptable range and the same goes for movies and this is exactly why HD formats haven't really taken off yet - the majority of people are happy to pay between £3 and £13 for a DVD, but they sure as hell aren't going to pay the £20+ even if it is in HD. I checked your site and your game sells at rough £10, I mean in the nicest possible way but I can download games off the XBox 360's live arcade for less than half that that are equally as good.
The final thing to take away is whatever your reasons for disliking having your product posted on the pirate bay etc. you certainly aren't going to be able to stop it, so why not make the most of it and embrace it? Try and get feedback on it, post a comment with a donate link in the torrent comments, even negate the worth of it by releasing your own free version with ads, there's plenty of people who'd rather download a with ads version from the official download source than a even an ad free potentially virus ridden source - hell play dirty if you really feel you have to and post in the comments that it is virus infected to convince people of the value-ad bonus of downloading it from a safe, official source!
That should take care of their toilet tissue needs for quite some time, I imagine.
Is the number of pages the new unit of choice, when it comes to legal threats ?
____
nico
Nico-Live
"Your honor, here I was, drinking my beverage in a Cafe, when someone dropped 4,000 pages on my head. I enter my hospital records of the concussion as Exhibit C."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
copyright laws are going to be enforced and you are not going to destroy the copyright system
my best suggestion to everyone using p2p to pirate music: quit, and be quick about it. get rid of that p2p software before you get into real trouble
25 replies so far, about 20 defending those poor pirates at the TPB, in their noble crusade against copyright. Won't someone please think of the pirates? If your product can be pirated, your business model is out of date! They're only a tracker! They don't host the files! WTF? 20 out of 25 Slashdot users have no plans to make money by selling software? No wonder this place has gone downhill since the 90s.
In the early days, people defending piracy used to distinguish between not-for-profit piracy (e.g. copy an mp3 for your friend) and large scale commercial piracy (e.g. copy thousands of DVDs for sale). The intuition was that it was good to share, but not to steal - and yes it is stealing if you sell something that isn't yours, because whoever bought it has paid you rather than the owner. So here's a question: ignoring the **AA, DRM and related issues, why isn't software/music/video a type of property? Because it can be easily copied for next to nothing? Or because it's incredibly expensive to create?
TPB crossed the non-profit/commercial piracy line long ago. They are extremely successful commercial pirates. They make a fortune from advertising and they don't give any of it back to the people who actually made the games, music and films on their site. I hope they are prosecuted, because just like a pirate DVD plant churning out thousands of discs an hour, they are making $millions from other people's work.
Bye bye karma.
BTW, Drod is awesome. Thanks.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
I could probably fill 4000 pages with questionable practises made by the Pirate Bay and the consequences they cause. Good on them for not holding back!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You seem awfully keen to see this investigation quashed, interesting don't you think. Perhaps you'd like to explain what you were doing in 1986 Mr Anonymous Coward...
who in the retarded candyfloss pits of hell modded parent as flamebait?
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
That's a lot of wasted toilet paper. Those prosecutors obviously don't care much about seriuos issues involving the environment.
E-mail killed telegram and nobody gives a damn. Times change and some business cant cope with that. People tend to care (too much IMHO) only about their own bank balance and because of that are not ready to pay whatever seller asks. People who get paid making something copyrightable are now in situation like a worker asking higher and higher pay doing same job. Not only aren't they getting higher pay but they are getting fired too.
So having to pay for a broadband connection and having to wait hours to get stuff has very little to do with it being cheaper than paying £10 per CD whether you like it or not?
Well, since payola shows that the recording industry PAYS people to distribute their content for free over a broadcast media to the public, having it done on a peer-to-peer network can't be anything to with how much money they aren't making, can it?
So is this party http://www.ldp.org.au/
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
1. there are 49 Democrat U. S. Senators, 49 Republican, 1 Independent/Democrat (WTF is that?) and 1 Independent [both independents caucuses with Democrats, whatever the F that means].
2. there are 232 Democrat U. S. Representatives, 199 Republican, and 4 seats on the USHoR are vacated.
So, no, there are only effectively two parties in the USofA.
Using the Brasilian example my fellow countryman morcego brought us, in our House of Representatives equivalent (Câmara dos Deputados), we do have 509 representatives thus divided: PMDB = 91, PT = 82, DEM = 60, PSDB = 61, PP = 42, PTB = 20, PR = 35, PSB = 28, PDT = 23, PPS = 16, PCdoB = 13, PV = 13, PSC = 7, PAN = 5, PMN = 5, PTC = 3, PHS = 3, PTdoB = 1, PRB = 1, for a total of eighteen effective parties.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
> Moreover, the people of Sweden are decidedly on their side, with the Pirate Party, which is sympathetic to TPB's cause, being one of the top ten political parties in the country.
So, being one of the top ten means what? Perhaps one percent of the votes in national elections? Yeah, that's massive support...
(Well. It might actually be true, but being one of the "top ten political parties" says nothing.)
Fair enough; I made some assumptions about your perspective that I shouldn't have.
Did they just compare murder to copyright infringement?!
Wow... Just Wow...
...then gets sued for Copyright infringement when they put it on Torrent.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The Pirate Party is a TOP 10 party in Sweden? So in U.S. terms, that would make them as popular as, maybe, the Marijuana Party?
Mine is Good
Naa, thats just after the metric to emperial conversion :}
Your obedient servant,
MLR
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I never understood you authoritarian types. So many of you giggle with glee when confronted with the idea of a person who copied a few bits being sexualy violated. Do you have self esteem issues around women (or men, as the case may be)?
Blar.
It may not work to divide up the reading of a legal document into sections. For example, if they define "the file sharing website" in an overly broad way on page 1, that might have ramifications on page 2,500 that won't be clear unless you've read both. And even if you have, it's impossible to keep all the implications straight in a document that long.
Honestly, I think that merely filing such a huge document should be seen by a court as obstructionist.
Some moderators tend to mod funny comments "interesting" or "insightful" since that gives a karma bonus, and "funny" does not.
May we live long and die out
"For comparison, the second-biggest murder case in Sweden required only 1,500 pages."
The biggest murder case in Sweden had to use BitTorrent to move the documents.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I've tried logging into pirate boards and asking nicely for them to buy the product. Not making any threats. They respond by banning my IP. :)
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
don't be juvenile. the site indexes 99.9% copyrighted material. Google index everything blindly, and they don't have categories for copyrighted movies.
TPB know they exist purely off the backs of other peoples hard work. If I am the local man to ask where to buy stolen goods or drugs, does it matter a fuck to the cops that I don't personally have it in my house?
get a clue kid. You are defending a bunch of arrogant thieves who play people like you like a violin.
TPB take down child porn. there is no tech reason for them to not abide by copyright, they just know they make more ad dollars if they don't.
... so basically, you think that no one should ever again make a single-player computer game. Okay, that's a possible stance to have, if you personally prefer MMORPGs and haven't found any single-player games that are at all interesting to you. Kind of sucks for people who don't like MMORPGs though.
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
I hope you get the help you need to manage your mis-directed anger. FSM bless you.
Blar.
But this is a blatant lie. Selling something online does NOT automatically make you rich. A fifteen year old kid could have made and sold that game. A struggling single mother could have made and sold that game. Or a filthy rich evil corporation could have made and sold that game. MANY kinds of people create content. SOME of them are rich. MANY of them are not. Not bothering to look and see who you're robbing is sheer thoughtlessness. Pretending that you're Robin Hood is incredibly insulting.
"Learn how to cook or something. You can't copy a hamburger."
So, your honestly stated position is that all game developers should give up and go back to flipping burgers, and no more games should be made, because games are an outdated concept?
I've gotcher 'Women In Gaming' RIGHT HERE!
Don't make us laugh. If they were hosting the worlds biggest collection of child porn torrents would you still be fine about it? Would you still think they are heroes for sticking it to the man?
Of course not. face facts, grow up and admit the fact that although you know what they do is massively dodgy, you turn a blind eye because you are too tight-assed to pay $10 for a 2 hour movies, despite being happy to literally piss it away in 20 minutes in a bar for some watered down beer.
Trying to hide behind legal definitions in cases like this is frankly pathetic. They are thieves and if you download copyrighted content, so are you. Fucking grow up.
The reality lots of people ignore is that copyright is a monopoly so it allows the copyright holder to abuse their position.
This is a complete abuse of the word "monopoly". Nobody's forcing you to buy media from major studios. Nobody's forcing artists to sign with major studios. Downloading their stuff for free might hurt industry organizations a little, but it also strengthens them by encouraging the popularity of works under their control. Where's the indie category on the Pirate Bay. Oh wait, there isn't one. If you really want them to go away, *don't acquire their stuff at all*. If you're pirating, you're still part of the system.
Your statement about Google is similarly lame. Google doesn't let you browse by category, and if they did, they certainly would't have categories that are flagrantly illegal. The Pirate Bay is nowhere near a common carrier.
Visit the
"......This is a complete abuse of the word "monopoly"......."
It is hard to have a rational discussion when people do not understand the concepts being discussed. Copyright is a government granted monopoly.
Monopoly is an absolute word - like virginity. You cannot be a partial virgin. You are one or you are not.
You might not like the concept of monopoly or la la la la pretend it does not exist but it is.
Also your use of the word pirating is interesting. You believe in Free Market capitalism? Are monopolies bad?
Google is more efficient than pirate bay. It present the direct page with a torrent better than pirate bay. Google makes money off of ads allowing you to find torrents and yet it does not share the revenue with artists.
So how can google be OK to allow me to find a torrent file and pirate bay is not OK? Google could EASILY refuse to index torrent sites yet it does. Think very carefully about this. But no......you have already decided.
Frankly your inability to equate google with pirate bay shows a certain logical deficiency.
Come back when you understand the word monopoly. And virgin.
Copyright is a government granted monopoly.
I am aware of this, but there was another part to your sentence. You said that copyright is a monopoly, therefore it allows abuse of the copyright holder's position. You are conflating Microsoft-style dominanance with a much more restricted form of control. What abuse do you think is happening that cannot be addressed by not acquiring copyrighted media?
So how can Google be OK to allow me to find a torrent file and pirate bay is not OK?
Because Google indexes (almost) everything. They want to be a common carrier or something close to it. The Pirate Bay does not. Look at the name of their site. Look at their logo, for crying out loud. It's a pirate ship with a cassette tape on it! TPB has no claim to legitimacy. Piracy is not a minor side effect of their operation, it's the entire goal. Do you not see any difference there? Maybe they'll get out of jail on a technicality (and that's okay -- technicalities are important, too), but you do not have the moral high ground here. If you want free stuff, go for it, but I'm sorry, you are not a crusader. You're a leech.
Visit the
".... The Pirate Bay does not. Look at the name of their site. Look at their logo, for crying out loud. It's a pirate ship with a cassette tape on it! TPB has no claim to legitimacy...."
TPB is up front about allowing people to find files to download. Where they operate they are not breaking the law. Google however pretends that they are not aiding finding files and making cash off the process.
There is no real difference between google and pirate bay except the name. You are free to believe they are different. Common Carrier status? They are a search engine. You ignore that if google really felt bad about aiding finding torrent files they would not index these files. But they do, and they make lots of money doing it.
Regarding your babbling about monopolies and abuse, I have no idea what idea you were trying impart on a simple concept. Any monopoly will always lead to abuse. I am not going to repeat has been well documented about abuse of monopolies.
they give a fuck whose copyright they are breaking
You do realize the difference between hosting CONTENT and hosting torrents, correct? Because your post implies you don't. TPB isn't breaking ANYONE's copyright by hosting torrents. The users are.
I believe your outrage is misplaced. Don't blame the technology. Blame the people who are using the technology for "bad things".
FYI: The ban was lifted after a decision in the riksdag during 2006.
First of all, the "Alliance for Sweden" has 178 seats as opposed to the oppositions 171 in the parliament, which corresponds to about 3% difference. And, how do you expect they can affect anything in parliament without any seats?
Secondly, you do not have the correct facts about the nuclear power laws in Sweden. The laws concerning nuclear technology from 1984 states two things: 1) construction of new nuclear power plants is prohibited and 2) nobody may work out plans, blueprints, make cost analysis with the intent of building a nuclear reactor in the country. (This is not an word-by-word translation of the law.) The second point was known as the "thought prohibition law". However, as of 2006, that parapgraph of the law has been removed.
The green party had nothing to do with this law in the first place. They had no seats in parliament at the time. The law came about because of the outcome of the nuclear power referendum of 1980. Its not like the greens are the only ones opposing nuclear power. The Social Democrats is very much a divided party when it comes to the issue of nuclear power.
That's a good soundbite, but in reality, very few people actually practice what you say to a level deep enough to mean something. Sure, they say things like "if it only saves one life" and "every life is worth more than evil XYZ Corp making money". But deep down, when they were actually IN a life/death situation and they are forced to make decisions, you see quite different behavior.
Like all things with matters of life and death, the answer is somewhere in the middle. We aren't going to sacrifice the whole world for one person (and yes, I know the music industry is far from "whole world", hardly comparable)
If we're talking about Pol Pot or perhaps Osama Bin Laden, I'd say your wrong - they're not worth more than $X the music industry makes. In fact, they are worth zero by being kept alive. And even going further, they are worth MORE $$$$ dead.
But if we're talking about the guy who cures cancer or Einstein, then I say you're right - they are worth far more than money and no amount of money is worth those lives.
The rest of everyone else fits somewhere in the middle. Again, it depends.
(posting AC because, obviously, this is a delicate subject)
If they scan it, and it is in english, a whole lot of people would happily help at defending against it ....
... current IP laws, with their various gaping flaws, will *NEVER* stand in front of a popular jury !!!
...
Intellectual property laws have so much overstapped their initial goals that *MANY* of us are willing to help at making them disappear (or at the very least, tremendously shrinking them) !!!
Another thing : a good defense would be to EXPOSE the history of copyright policies around the world (like most wrongdoings in the last century, including sponsorship of Dictators - Saddam H. - it can be traced back to the USA)
PS : Yes, I'm an avid reader of Noam Chomsky !!!
But, all things considered, it may be a bogus info : no sight of this on TBS web site
It didn't take a genius to figure out shipping out a huge bill didn't make sense for AT&T and they would fix it quickly - and so they did. Now I just get a one-page bill every month. You can still look up all the individual data charges online if you like, but since data is a flat fee who cares?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The opinion in Sweden has changed since 1980.
Current opinion is a strong support for nuclear power and a new referendum would probably mean victory for the nuclear power positive parties. One of the government coalition parties have recently also gone public with a desire to build more nuclear power plants and the largest of the coalition parties don't want nuclear power gone to 2010.
A mostly forgotten part of the referendum in 1980 is also the fact that the year 2010 was put forward as a good year to close the current reactors because of two things:
1) The reactors where only supposed to last until this year (now not true because of new methods of repairing)
2) By 2010 a suitable replacement for nuclear power would have been found. Exactly what this replacement was supposed to be was never established, but more or less supposed to be fusion power.
Since none of this two points is meet, there is a real question of how valid the referendum is. Also, you can ask how long a referendum should hold - a great number of the current voters wasn't allowed to vote in this referendum due too simply being underage or not born when it was held. I have some doubt why we should follow a decision that my grandfather voted on, when he isn't alive now and don't have to face the consequence of the decision.
Parent is absolutely right. Railing against people who are trading your software is like yelling at people who put your song on a mix tape -- it's self defeating. The media trading ecosystem has always existed for as long as there has been media, and always will, so fighting that war is to be defeated before you begin. However, if you were to clear the unwarranted resentment from your eyes, you might realise that sites like The Pirate Bay give you unprecedented *access* to this ecosystem. Thousands of transactions that used to happen in private are now happening in a way you can discover and participate in. You can capitalise on this -- you can insert yourself into this ecosystem and try to lure buyers for your product and accessories (or even T-shirts), or simply make a moral plea. You never could have done this 20 years ago. All of the trading would have gone on behind your back, instead. Technology has put you in a superior position to what you had before -- you just don't realise it yet. And you won't be able to take advantage of it if you treat the participants as criminals.
it was all in Wingdings. Size 72.
Well, that's a bright prosecutions department - *everyone* knows that pirates cannot read!
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
long before there was a coin in existence
;-)
the love of music is all that needs for music to be created
it's a passion, and it has nothing to do with money, and it is all the motivation you need to fill every iPod on this planet
we're just cutting out the middle man
and fuck him and his laws which have no moral basis whatsoever, and merely exist to ensure a cashcow
you think the money goes to the artists? have you ever seen an artist's contract?
most would do better going the radiohead route and putting out an internet tip jar- they'd do better financially!
copyright has nothing to do with protecting artists, it has to do with protecting economic middlemen
economic middle men in an economic model which just went extinct
oh dear, what a communist i am
hardly the point, don't you think?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Modded as troll why? Purely because the slashdot crowd hate having their bubble broken, that TPB are heroes and that copyright infringement is harmless fun.
Frankly its getting pathetic, EMI just sacked 2,000 staff, I guess they were all "teh evil MAFIAAAAA!!!111" and deserve to live on welfare so you can take music for free?
I would love to see the selfish arrogant cunts running thepiratebay behind bars where they belong.
Try asking for less and not upfront. Maybe. Not sure how it would work, but I see a very big difference between what I can put on my shelf and what just sits on my hard disk and will be gone with the next reinstall. For example I bought one simple casual game (similar to the TIM) about a year ago. Paid something in order of 11GBP. As a download. If it would have been any more it would have been a no brainer - I pass. I know I could try to grep my e-mails to find the key and just redownload the exe from developers site, but for all practical purposes it is gone now. Not unlike two freelancer copies I am looking at now (with first one the disc went too bad. and .iso is now permanently in the games folder too. Just decided - microsoft or not, game is good enough so that 18GBP I paid for the second copy just Might motivate someone enough to follow up with part 2).
All in all - quality matters. And each channel will bear pricing only up to x. I.E. Steam - I will never touch it with a 10 feet pole, althou they are offering quite tempting freebies occasionally. Pay the same as for the proper copy + bear with some shitty software on my PC? No, thanks.