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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."
The second biggest murder case required 1500, how much did the biggest require?
Video Production Support
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
Is this one of those things where you think that the whole world lives under US law?
Actually, even in the US, what sort of penalties could you possibly face for "moving operations out of the country"?
sic transit gloria mundi
Geesh, you 800,000 and upper noobs just can't take a joke...
It all comes down to your definition of "real legitimate laws" now doesn't it? I personally don't see them as being very legitimate.
And, regarding this statement: "....no one has the right to just take something of mine for free that I only offered them for sale. That's just theft." If you offer good software at a reasonable price (that your market can afford) people will buy it. If you charge more than the market is willing to pay then people will steal it.
Let's not kid ourselves - using the word "stealing" for "copyright infringement" means we can't think clearly about the case, as we get a cognitive mess up between two different things.
It is also clear that attitudes follow behaviors - those that do copyright infringement will tend to think that is more OK than they did before they did infringement, those that release closed software/films will think that "protection" of their copyrighted material ("property" is another cognitive distorter) is important and "their right", etc.
The issue with copyright laws is what effect do they have on people's behavior, in total. This is a combination of benefits - people creating more, some people feeling that they get rightfully compensated, etc. They also have some negative effects - for instance, the feeling that "copyrighted material" is property, when it has been released as part of culture and is actually part of other people's minds. Which the originator isn't paying rent for. Or another negative effect: Those that break copyright law end up disrespecting laws overall. Or another: They block people from creating derivative works. Or another: They end up closing in a lot of stuff that would otherwise be public domain, and where the author has no monetary interest - it's just inconvenient. Or another: Their enforcement end up with draconian policies hitting everywhere.
Personally, I am in favor of copyright, assuming the right limitations. I think that it is reasonable to be able to block commercial use for a limited time, against proper release of the materials afterwards. A reasonable limited time for software is probably in the range of 2 to 5 years, with "proper release of materials afterwards" meaning source code/version control dump release, with build files etc. For entertainment, reasonable a copyright term is probably about 5 years.
The net result of freeing private copying is that money would have to be made elsewhere: Movies would have to make their money at the box office and from the benefits of buying DVDs *beyond access to the actual movie data*, music would have to give benefit *beyond the actual audio data*, etc. Easy delivery of the data is one such benefit; at the right price, that's value. Packaging you can put on the shelf is another.
This might kill really expensive movie production. I feel this is OK - there are a ton of good movies made cheaply, movies that mostly languish due to little marketing. I believe people switching to these would result in people that are as happy as they are today - and possibly people that are more reflected - and as a such would be at least net neutral to society, and if this result in less of society's resources going into movie production with the same (or higher) benefit coming out: Net positive.
I hadn't thought of the last one until now - interesting.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Last time I've checked, distributing information on from whom to get a certain piece of a file is not against any law in Sweden, the same way it is not against the law to sell someone a firearm that could be used to kill another human being in the USA.
I find piracy highly immoral. Plundering on the seas and taking over ships near certain parts of Africa results in losses of life and property. Of course I know that you were talking about copyright infringement, but I just wanted to hilight the fact that using the wrong expressions can cloud an issue and mislead people. There is no such thing as piracy of copyrighted works. There is no such thing as intellectual property, except as a misleading umbrella term to refer to copyright, patent and trademark law under one title.
I think people should question laws more often. A law in the best case is the codified morality of society's majority, while still respecting the minority. In the worst case it is a tool of power, for those in power. There is nothing inherently moral about laws and immoral about committing a crime. A lot of unjust laws have been created over time and some are still in existence today. It is enough if we think about the 19th century's slavery related laws: could we claim that it was immoral for a black person to break the law when he/she sought freedom?
I don't think copyright law is based on morality, but I don't think it is a strongly immoral law either. I would say it is immoral to the extent a particular person values the freedom of information.
Copyright deals with information, regardless of how the information manifests as atoms. Property is of atoms, tangible material or of a part of tangible material. Stealing is undefined on information, because stealing can only manifest itself on property, which information is not. You cannot steal information in the sense that you relocate material under your own control and deprive someone else of those same atoms. Copyright infringement is a civil matter in a lot of countries around the world.
You do not have property rights on information, that is an impossibility. Information cannot be taken from you, so that no longer have it unless you lose all physical representation of that information, including the copy that exists in your brain. What you describe as something taken from you in reality is information that a third party transmitted to a fourth party, information on how one person may align bits in his storage equipment.
We have things called rights, which are basically ideas that we strongly believe make for a better society. These rights evolved over human history and there is nothing in them that is inherently obvious. Specifically, private property in relation to material turned out to be a good idea for the human species. It very well might be that private property is entirely undesirable for another sentient species, because for example that species is much more hive minded.
Someone had the idea to try to apply property terminology to information, so copyright was born (I'm not suggesting that the
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
That's how we started - we've been successful enough that we can have part-time employees, and we're not far away from the two lead developers being able to quit their day jobs and live the dream. (I'm one of the part-timers.)
I guess that's what it's all about, really - being able to make a living doing something you love. It's hard not to take it personally when others don't see it the same way.
You bring up the 360 - I'm not entirely convinced that'll work out, as it's expensive to get on the 360 and get an ESRB rating. We'd love to do it, but it just doesn't make sense for the sorts of sales we'd get from the 360 audience. I remember that Space Giraffe didn't sell all that well, being a fairly niche game, and we're kind of in the same boat (although I don't think we're nearly as weird).
If prosecuting someone for illegally copying copyrighted content takes flattening half a rain forest to cover the paper-work, I say this "intellectual property"-thing might not be worth it.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.