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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."
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.
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.
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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.
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.