Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Well, he is not just a member of the Swedish parliament. He is also a member of the largest party in the current coalition government. And he is far from being alone. Last time I checked 13 MPs from his party had expressed similar viewpoints in mainstream Swedish media.
And young people seem to understand the issues at stake here a lot better. The youth organizations of all the parties currently in the Swedish parliament have similar viewpoints.
There is no single majority party. The largest party has only 35% * and is on the side that lost in the last election. On that side there are three parties. The winning side, and thus the government, is an alliance of four parties.
The winning alliance is somewhat to the right, the others are somewhat to the left. There are lots of other parties, but here I'm only including the seven that have seats in the parliament.
Our multi-party system is probably somewhat less efficient than the US two-party system, because of the need for constant haggling and give-and-take and compromise, but it has the important advantage that, as voters, we can nuance our votes by voting, not only for a preferred side, but also for one of the parties within that side.
Each voter can optionally nuance his vote further, by voting not only for a party, but also for one individual within the party that he votes for.
(The way this works is, by voting for a party you vote for a list of representatives, and optionally you can also mark one of the members of the list. Members with many such individual votes get precedence.)
* Thank you furbearntrout for that link.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I guess the biggest murder case was the one on Olof Palme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Palme) our prime minister, it's been over 21 years (died 1 march 1986) since then and it haven't been solved yet. And I guess they have put quite a lot of effort into that one.
Anyway it is quite immaterial, Sweden has independent, free (of political and financial affiliations) and working press. So if the government screws they are going to get a healthy beating in all papers, no matter of the party. Which will practically guarantee losing next election.
And then in Sweden it is illegal for the government to have any involvement in court cases and justice interpretation matters
why is this a troll? it's insightful! the Pirate Party didn't get in to Riksdagen, because they didn't even pass the 4% limit. But it's true, that out of approximately 10 active political parties in sweden, they are one, and therefore top ten! that they're the smallest of the parties, and barely got any support seems to be ignored by kdawson..
i do however believe that the guys of TPB haven't broken any of the current laws in sweden.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
In the elections 2006, the Piratparty got a stunning 0,63 % of the votes cast.
More significant may be that according to polls, 30-40 % of those who answer say that they share files on internet.
You seem to be trying to suggest that they are the smallest party in Sweden, and that every other party got more support. This is false, just as claiming that Sweden has only 10 parties is also false:
List of political parties in Sweden.
Pirates probably use Microsoft Office.