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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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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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.
Oh, and speaking of the Pirate Bay investigation, Pirate Bay operator Anakata confessed to this crime under interrogation. The Palme assassination, that is. He was 5 years old at the time. Interrogators were not amused.
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.
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.
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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Australia has a fishing party. :)
Unfortunately we dont get to hear much from them. They are usually out fishing.
Is there a link to the .torrent?
Pure fucking urban legend. My games are there too, I asked very nicely, they didn't do shit, or even bother replying. It's pure fantasy land bullshit put around by TPB themselves that they give a fuck whose copyright they are breaking. They spread that bullshit about just asking nicely to make them seem like the good guys, but its just a big fat joke on the people who worship them. They make a fortune in advertising, and then have the cheek to ask people for money to buy an island, which no doubt went straight to a Swiss bank account.
Believe me, those guys don't give a damn whose business they are wrecking, they only care about their own bank balance. it's truly sad to see so many people fall for it.
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