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Four Indicted in Pirate Bay Case
paulraps writes "Suddenly the founders of the Pirate Bay are not so hearty. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site were indicted in Sweden on Thursday on charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law. And this is more than just a shot across the bows. The prosecutor reckons that they can be hooked for 'promoting other people's copyright breaches' but there will be no walking the plank: instead, they face fines of up to $200,000 and the confiscation of all their hardware. 'The Swedish prosecutor listed dozens of works that had been downloaded through The Pirate Bay site, including The Beatles' Let It Be, Robbie Williams' Intensive Care and the movie Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire. Plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.'"
This is a really interesting case, since the recording industry association and lobby (Ifpi and Antipiratbyrån) seems to have made their homework this time. This case will probably go all the way to the supreme court or even to the european court and both sides seem to be well prepared for this showdown.
The interesting argument brought up is that the defendants are in this to make money, and the prosecutor says he can prove elaborate plans to split the quite hefty incomes from advertising that the Pirate Bay is raking in. While linking to copyrighted material may be legal, making money from actively enabling people copyright infringement probably is harder to sneak by the courts.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Nothing has been downloaded through the Pirate bay's site.
Plenty has been downloaded because of it.
All the legal arguments are going to hinge around this vital distinction, so it would help if the submitter could have been bothered to get it right.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
So if we can prosecute swedish people for crimes that aren't crimes in their country can we also give speeding tickets to drivers on the autobahn that drive over 55 mph?
Good thing they didn't copy a CD, otherwise they'd be paying $1.5 million!
It's been said 1000 times: These things were not downloaded FROM the Pirate Bay - they just provide the reference as to where they could be downloaded from. Do you think that by listing The Beatles and Robbie Williams I'm supposed to have sympathy? By listing Harry Potter are they 'thinking of the children?' - is the list of big media supposed to be scary? TPB are very careful not to break Swedish law. They don't care what the laws of other countries are - (I'm looking at you USA) as they live in SWEDEN they are only concerned with Swedish law.
I hope they come out squeaky clean - as they should as they have not broken their countries law.
Or let them go.
Just have their lawyers show up in court with a laptop (with wireless connection and the appropriate software installed) and go to Google. Search for "Harry Potter Goblet Fire Torrent" and click a link. Viola- bittorrent starts up. Therefore, Google can be used to search for torrents, therefore they should be charged, too. If they are not charged, then it demonstrates selective prosecution. The same goes for ANY search engine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You must believe that there's something wrong with sharing. You can talk about money and laws the industry has made up, but you are ultimately recommending control and censorship of the internet. Freedom for all should trump the ability of a few to make money through obsolete publication models. Really, how impressed should I be that fifty year old media is available on the internet? The case would be laughable if it did not have the potential to do so much harm.
...that the damages being sought are less than the RIAA demanded from that woman who downloaded a few songs. I mean, $200K apiece for 4 people? I'll bet if they asked people to make Paypal donations to help them pay their legal fees and/or fines (while keeping the site up), they'd get millions pretty quickly. A lot of people would pay to keep a service like that up.
IANAL but as far as I know the police in Sweden is not actually allowed to search your property unless the crime you're accused for is serious enough that it could result in a prison sentence... So what they are basically saying is the police broke the law?
I've found pirated material via Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Altavista, and others. If courts world-wide decide that search engines that merely index and catalog illegal or copyrighted material can be held liable for the trade of illegal or copyrighted material, then that will be a HUGE problem for every company that has search as its core business.
What about hiring a prostitute from an escort/dating service listed in the phonebook? Can the publishers of the phonebook be charged as accomplices to the crime?
This case will have profound consequences for anyone in the search or directory business.
-ted
While you seem to be under the impression that the prosecutor, police and whole judicial system are running errands for the recording industry, only 15 cases of copyright infringement via file sharing were investigated in Sweden last year. So bribes or no bribes, it's not exactly a systematic witch hunt.
Do you have any facts - not speculations - supporting that any prosecutor, judge or police took bribes from the recording industry or its lobby groups ? I very much doubt that.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
...but by lawsuits?
Honestly, I think The Pirate Bay is the best thing to happen. Because of it, we've gotten rid of cable TV. My wife and I will download a TV show or a movie before we buy it, watch a few episodes or minutes, and then go and buy the legit copy. The Pirate Bay is today's equivalent to reruns or syndication for television shows, or Blockbuster or NetFlix for the movie industry. The monopolists are just mad because they lose control over which productions to push and which to let fall by the wayside. Even better, torrent search sites also replace Nielsen for rating what is popular. I can find the latest popular movies just by sorting by seeds, and because of this I have purchased about 40 movies that I would NEVER have even heard of. Heck, the wife and I actually bought the Bourne trilogy because of The Pirate Bay -- the TV commercials and trailers were so bad that we would never have even thought of it.
Am I a pirate? In some ways, yes, but we own tens of thousands of dollars worth of music, TV DVDs, and movies, and I attribute it solely to being able to taste before I buy. I think in the past year we've had MAYBE ten torrents that I forgot to erase when I realized I didn't like what I saw.
Remember who these large production companies are: they're multi-tiered organizations where the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand. These companies do many things:
1. Raise money and invest in productions (i.e., producing)
2. Market finished productions (i.e., advertising)
3. Protect the industry insiders (actors, directors, producers, and crew) from competition by locking the distribution medium (i.e., monopolizing)
Now, the future is getting rid of them. Want to raise money for a money or a TV pilot? Invest in making a trailer. Put it out there. Get people interested to fund your production, maybe even sell bonds (of course the SEC and IRS will prevent you from doing this versus a market economy where people understand the risks inherent to investing). Once you've raised enough, you go and shoot the flick. Give it away online at low res, or evne at high res, and sell value added products to raise the funds. If people love the production, they'll pay for it. We do. Many of our friends do. Most of my family does.
I laugh when people try to get great shows back on the air, like Serenity. Joss Whedon is one of the most vile monopolists ever. It's his fault directly for the death of Firefly. He could get online, start a money raising campaign, and go back to business. But he wants to pander to his union/monopolist buddies. He loves the residuals he receives on the backs of others. He's part of the industry, and that's why I'm glad Firefly failed, even though we love the show and watch the legal DVDs regularly. Screw Joss, screw Hollywood, and screw the industry twice over -- they're not ready for a truly market-based economy of art, where people subsidize the FUTURE production of more content by purchasing the previously produced content.
The Internet will destroy these monopolists/mercantilists quicker and quicker every day. Their only option to "save themselves" and their grotesque profits is to use the laws that THEY created, prompt the pawns that THEY elected, and force people to pay money that the people earned through labors they actively did. The people behind the Pirate Bay spend an amazing amount of time keeping it running. The users may submit content, but the servers, Internet connections, software code and overall support need labor to keep it running. TPB deserves every penny, and then some. Maybe TPB should produce a high budget movie or TV series.
Does anyone read that and NOT think: "What's the difference from Record labels?" =P
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
I'm not done downloading that 17 gb of private MySpace photos yet!!!
Is downloading movies and songs illegal? yes.
NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!
UPLOADING *copyrighted* movies and songs *which you don't have the copyright holder's permission to distribute* is illegal.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Given Swedish law, they don't have a lot of choice except to go after large folks like TPB. They're trying to get a legal precedent set. The accusation of bribe is likely unsubstantiated, but given that a person is a prosecutor do they a) go after folks committing actual evil acts or b) mount a hideously expensive case against folks sharing music and movies?
A moral prosector would of course tell the record companies to find a business model that doesn't depend on supply of expensive physical media for digital content that can be copied for almost no cost. Since sharing actually boosts sales of music the issue is not piracy per se, but rather the fact that open sharing prevents the recording industry from gaining exclusive control of the media. The only way to do this now is to seek to have ISP filtering/spyware/big brother type shenanigans instituted on the government level and to lock folks out of trying to circumvent government mandated via DMCA-like provisions.
The RIAA is playing the long game here to try to become the world's gatekeeper for all entertainment content and the prosecutor for the Swedish government is almost certainly being offered at the very least political influence, if not actual monetary bribes. The lack of a plethora of prior cases should not be taken as lack of an agenda here. When you make a move like this, it is calculated to have the most impact possible, and the RIAA is hoping for Sweden to make another Napster decision. Then you'll see the courts flooded with cases against infringement.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
The question still remains: what is that value?
Since all of these various and sundry people paid NOTHING
for it, then you can't make any conclusions about the value
of the work. Sure, you can assign some arbitrary dollar
values to the cost of bandwidth and the cost of storage
space but those are already sunk costs.
The rest of my bandwidth is FREE if I am not already using it.
The last 200G of that oversized hard drive is FREE if I am not already using it.
Piracy happens because the people have the means of production
and the marginal production cost is pretty much zero.
Now since these guys are Sysops and not just random Joes,
the justice equation is a bit different. This is perhaps
the first high profile MPAA/RIAA case where they actually
had any business threatening the perpetrators with 6 figure
damage awards.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A lot of people are saying "Why isn't Google in the dock, I can search for infringing torrents!?" Well in the USA, Google and other search engines are protected by the DMCA. Yes, not all of the DMCA is bad, in fact, pretty much only the copy protection anti-circumvention stuff is bad. The rest is pretty good, it indemnifies ISPs when their caches or search indices contain infringing material. All they have to do comply with the takedown protocol.
See, in the US, if you're operating an index like Google or Napster that works on an automated basis or is controlled by your users, you don't have to worry about infringing material, until you have actual knowledge of it. Once you have actual knowledge of infringing material you have to do something about it. Thats the difference between Google and Pirate Bay (besides the fact that TPB is not in the USA.) Once Google has actual knowledge of infringing material they take it down and they are OK.
Furthermore, Google's service just finds torrents. TPBs helps you find torrents, but they also host the torrents. After you've download the torrent from TPB, TPB's tracker helps you connect to the other peers for exchanging the requested infringing material. Combined with the actual knowledge of infringing torrents on their site, that's a lot closer to contributory infringement than anything that Google does.
Back to your regularly scheduled TPB Swedish Legal Follies.
Here's my painting. You'll notice it's 'licensed' under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Copy this painting even in breach of its license (which may be illegal or unlawful in your jurisdiction) and I will still maintain that the major record labels and movie studios are a corrupt cartel, and that the guys behind the Pirate Bay are both visionaries and heroes.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Why don't you write a song or book or create a painting, and I'll copy it. Lets see how quick you change your tune.
You realize you're throwing this challenge down to a group largely consisting of people who regularly write copyrighted works of computer code and contribute them freely to the world, right? Most of those here who don't have a coding credit to their name make extensive use of those works, contribute testing and bug reports, etc. You're talking to people who already put their money where your mouth is. You're doing it on a site that's owned by a company whose entire mission statement is facilitating that, and which makes money doing it.
This (admittedly cowardly) anonymous poster is not a troll.
The point is valid tho a little rude.
Any one using torrents to download copyrighted material, especially recently released copyrighted material, should never lose sight of the fact that what they are doing is illegal and probably at least a little immoral. You have to balance the immoral hijacking of the copyright laws against taking the results of peoples work without compensating them. Likewise there is the issue of artificially inflated monopoly prices vs what the real cost of production is.
There is a strong argument that 50 year old songs by dead artists should be in public domain. Until our government representatives were bribed by rich corporations (i.e. disney, et al) copyright law was roughly 28 years. Numerous egregious examples ("Happy Birthday", "It's a wonderful life", "Mickey Mouse") show clearly how this area of the law is being abused at a large cost to society which has a reasonable expectation that works will go into public domain where they can be used to create new art.
I would also say that when employees in this industry make over a million dollars a year, they are being overcompensated and there must be some artificial reason why which will eventually be flattened.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Yes, but the
Just to note that you're referring to things not being freely shared which agitates the
look, don't get me wrong, I think artists making gajillions shouldn't complain either. But I do take issue with your last statement. I'll dissect it a bit.
"There is no right to profit from your work."
Correct.
"There is a right to try to profit from your work."
Sure, even if that's not written in stone anywhere - it's as basic right, I suppose.
"The difference is subtle but very important"
Absolutely.
"and frankly, I'm starting to get more than a bit sick of the copyright creeps demanding that all society and technology bend over backwards to help them profit."
And that's where I take issue. There is a difference between telling society that
A. they -must- purchase Artwork X
and
B. they -must not- pirate Artwork X
In situation A, society is bending over backwards to help them profit and I agree, there shouldn't be some mandate saying that every consumer must purchase a minimum of Artworks to help the artists.
In situation B, however, all that is said is that if society -wants- a given Artwork, they'd better either pay for it, or deal with the fact that they won't have said Artwork. And that, I think, is perfectly fair. If that results in the Artist neither getting purchases -nor- popularity from pirating, then that's the result of the Artist's own choice.
Hey you know thats bullshit. My god-given right to take what isn't mine trumps some production-assistants need to eat and pay their bills. After all, it was their fault that they worked hard on some crap like Harry Potter, and it is karmic justice for me to take it. Maybe if enough people take and enjoy the content without paying they'll stop making crap like that.
The RIAA should be careful what they ask for...because they just might get it. The RIAA's entire case and frame-of-reference is that they are providing better entertainment product that anyone else and that all copying of their product is stealing material goods from them. They are then attacking people who download and 'consume' RIAA product. These attacks, they believe, will stop the downloading for free and return to the purchase of individual units of RIAA product on disk media.
This is not true. The distribution of free entertainment product is an established fact now. It's not going to go away. Nor will the RIAA/MPAA ever be able to charge for downloaded product what they charge for the product on disk. The market has changed.
By persecuting people who consume downloaded RIAA/MPAA product, they will not bring these people back to overpriced entertainment product, they will create a secondary market of non-RIAA product that is available through low or no-cost download.
The RIAA is destroying the market for their own product.
They assume that because the RIAA product is better entertainment quality now that it will always be better entertainment product that non-RIAA material. But non-RIAA entertainment will get better over time given the large audience.
The RIAA should refocus on what they do best. They should be taking all the dork music and videos on YouTube and the alt-RIAA music sites and giving recommendations for improvement. Then they should offer contracts to marginal bands for low cost distribution of music and videos. They need to learn to function inside the 'long tail'. If they don't then someone else will and they will lose the opportunity to enter and profit in this new market.
Most likely, the RIAA will split the music business into two basic parts; a mass-media world of a few stars and an 'underground' of no stars, but groups with clusters of devoted fans. This exists today, but what the RIAA will create in the coming years is a market where the people in the musical underground will have no interest in the rock/pop star world . A market situation will arise where large sections of the population will have a 'magnetic like-pole' adversion to RIAA mass pop product. This would be bad for the RIAA (I know, they're just a front company, but I mean all the companies that fund the RIAA) because it will cause them to permanently lose 1/3 to 1/2 of their current market.
If that happens, then it won't matter if they lower their product prices, or remove the DRM. Because a large segment of the musical market will have a fundamental aversion to their product, and won't consume it under any market conditions.
This is the true danger to the RIAA in their current actions.
Official Judgement
Explanation
Sued for downloading, not uploading music.
Lost court case, via summary judgement.
I don't know how much clearer I can make it that you are wrong.
I know it's embarrassing but it's much more embarrassing to keep clinging to something that's already been proven false. Downloading unauthorized copyrighted works is illegal. It's not just uploading that's illegal. The RIAA DID sue someone for downloading - and won. They won because it's illegal. Please just listen to reason, admit you're wrong and we'll just move along.
Your argument is effectively that people have a choice whether they buy music or not, so they shouldn't complain when the terms are unfair because they're free to reject those terms.
That's a gross oversimplification, presumably based on the myopic assumption that market forces are the end-all be-all of any socio-economic situation.
Often, fans aren't just buying a CD because the object is worth $x to them, they're also doing it to support the artist. The value in the transaction is not just the object, but the knowledge that the fan has given money to someone they admire, to encourage them to keep creating good art. Considering this, it's very much the fan's concern that pretty much all the money they pay is going to someone other than the artist.