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."

Comments

Second biggest?

[tonsofpcs]

The second biggest murder case required 1500, how much did the biggest require?

Re:Second biggest?

[alshithead]

"There are only 2 parties here, but many other countries have far more than 2 parties."

I had to research to see that you are probably in the USA because you didn't state that specifically. While we in the USA have two predominant parties, there are many other registered parties. Keep in mind that the Libertarian and Green parties are slowly gaining supporters and the Democrats and especially Republicans are losing supporters as other parties propound ideals that fall in line with voters' primary concerns. Ron Paul has not done well in the primaries but he sure as hell has done well with fund gathering. Bloomberg may run as an independent and with his personal capital available as funds he may be a lot more successful than Perot was.

I've been a bit off topic here but I'll try to bring it back on track...It really doesn't matter how many parties are involved in a country's government. The majority party gets to write the rules (laws) and more importantly...interpret them. The Swedish government is no different than any other country. If the powers that be get a bug up their ass, they will swat it to the extent that they can whether that is "right" or not.

Damn, I sound awfully cynical tonight.

Distributed legal processing & response

[G4from128k]

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)

I think this sums it up perfectly

[Amorymeltzer]

From TFA:

thanks to the threat of a high-profile legal action, plenty of free advertising. Given:
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!

Related article

[Reziac]

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/

Re:So what?

[glwtta]

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"?

Re:I'm always disturbed

[GuNgA-DiN]

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.

Re:I'm always disturbed

[A beautiful mind]

But, let's not kid ourselves, it is breaking real legitimate laws.

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.

There's a certain crowd that believes that piracy is somehow noble.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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