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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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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.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property...but I have three stories on Slashdot's front page.
SHHH! Don't discourage him. He's doing swell, so far.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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'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.
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
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.
Hmm, I'm not sure that they'd want to pay for all the bandwidth to have thousands and thousands of people download a 4000-page document from their web site. That would probably cost a lot of money.
If only there was some way that they could start it out on the internet - say, "seed" it - and then those interested in it could share it amongst themselves, using the "seed" as a guide. I'm sure that would save them some bandwidth costs. If only there was technology to do so, and I could somehow inform TPB of the existence and benefits of this technology.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
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.
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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Be yourself no matter what they say
Is there a link to the .torrent?