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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?
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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.
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?
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
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.
Parlay? *grins*
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
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.
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!
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
You can't "selectively focus" on documents where the author is actively trying to hide things from a casual reading.
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!!
I would have just replied "Sorry, we can only read ODF, what us being communist hipppy pirates and all"
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.
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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.
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.
distribute the task and let's all compile a 12,000 page rebuttal...
for glorious death! for rohan!
Actually, what their doing is almost certainly legal. They have been operating for years without being successfully prosecuted. They hold that they are acting within the law.
If it was clear they were breaking the law, then it would not have taken so long to start a prosecution, now would it have required so much paper work. Everyone knows exactly what they do, and they have never denied it.
If you think that they are acting illegally, please tell us exactly what law they are breaking.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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Is there a link to the .torrent?
what he's saying is that without hugely abusing other people's rights (monitoring internet traffic, installing drm software to control everybody's computers totally) it is technically impossible to stop.
a total break-down of copyright and a free-for-all on all intellectual property is here infinitely better than the alternative.