Prince, Village People to Sue The Pirate Bay

castrox writes to tell us that The Pirate Bay's legal concerns are continuing to grow. Prince and the Village People are planning to sue the popular torrent site with the help of the Web Sheriff law firm. John Giacobbi of Web Sheriff has also asked Swedish band ABBA to join the cause. The suit is seeking "millions of dollars" in damages, although it's still uncertain to whom the charges will be directed. The likely targets are the four Pirate Bay founders who were indicted a few weeks ago on charges of breaking copyright law. Prince has taken investigative action against The Pirate Bay in the past.

Comments

Civil vs. Criminal

[Nemilar]

I know that in the US, there's a very big difference between the civil courts and the criminal courts. While it seems that under Swedish law, the hosting of torrent files doesn't appear to be a crime, does anyone know if they have the same sort of distinctions between civil and criminal courts? Could they be found innocent in criminal court, yet still be forced to pay thousands/millions of damages in civil court?

Re:Civil vs. Criminal

[Anonymous Coward]

Shrug. They don't have thousands/millions to pay - the pirate bay is NOT profitmaking, it only takes a few nerds to keep it going. Any "victory" over the pirate bay would be merely symbolic - and probably pyrrhic, translating into increased support for the (unaffiliated with the Pirate Bay, but obviously sympathetic) Pirate Party, which is a surprisingly powerful political force in Europe at this stage (and the more the USA fights it, the more powerful it gets, thanks to strong anti-US sentiment in Europe due to the USA's assholery). It's not like the site itself can even be shut down by legal action due to its distributed nature, and even if it was, it's not like it's the only bittorrent tracker site.

Smart move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using well known but old artists who don't sell much nowadays could be a smart move. The danger of a boycott campaign from fans is less likely to happen because those who were their most loyal fans are now in their 40s or more.

I'm not sure about Prince, but Village People and Abba certainly don't sell much these days.

Web hotels?

[SmallFurryCreature]

I totally agree. Weve said for years that web hotels who are making millions, even billions, by renting out web space to file-sharing websites should take more responsibility and control these websites, Giacobbi said.

What the? This firm is called web sherrif, you would think they would have a slightly better grasp of the terms of the trade. It makes me almost instantly classify this suit as totally without merit and just a case of some stupid musicians being conned by a lawyer who smells a fat check (and not coming from the direction the musicians think).

Claims of millions of whatever currency are already laughable enough, does this guy really think that thepiratebay its isp or in fact anyone even remotely connected to P2P makes billions? Does he even understand how much money that is wether you measure it in dollars, euro's or kronen?

Web sherrif? Hahaha :D

[Idaho]

Seriously, they're sending in this clueless company "Web Sherrif"?

I'm sure thepiratebay is getting scared now - see the links about halfway on that page to read the fine letters mailed between "the white stripes/Web sherrif" and thepiratebay admins.

Prince sue?

[Wowsers]

Will Prince sue over his "Planet Earth" album he gave away for free in the Daily Mail 'newspaper'?

What about a countersuit?

[mangu]

In their legal pages, there's this email from Microsoft

Notice how the lawyer claims that "the source code for Windows 1998, Windows NT, and/or Windows 2000 ... is on your system at the following location:
http://tracker.piratbyran.org/torrents-details.php?id=2614,"

and further on they state that "The information in this notification is accurate. I swear under penalty of perjury ..."

The information in that email is NOT accurate, since no part of the source code has ever been in the location they mention. Wouldn't that be ground for a countersuit for defamation, or whatever it's called?

Re:Remember "A New Hope"

[griffjon]

Well, technically speaking; there were many networks between Napster and bittorrent -- AudioGalaxy; Gnutella and its various clients, Morpheus, Kazaa... They keep getting struck down; and keep getting more savvy and functional. bittorrent has value as an actual distribution channel (I'd argue that AudioGalaxy had the potential to be the solution for bridging P2P filesharing and a profit model for bands, but that's another rant).

So even if bittorrent somehow gets compromised (too many bad seeds, spying, lawsuits, etc.), there will be another evolution in the sharing tools. It's a cat-and-mouse game that will continue until the Industry realizes that it's business model is gone and that it must (wait for it) innovate!

But I dream.

Re:Guess I was wrong about him

[Dan541]

But now I see that he, too, is a copyright monger, he just wants the copyrights for himself rather than for the label. Or maybe he just wants to be paid for his work. I'm no fan of the RIAA, and have downloaded my fair share of torrents, but I wouldn't hold it against someone for wanting to stop the theft of their product. If they get all ignorant-Metallicaish about it, that's another thing, but do we really chastise people for wanting to stop the theft of their work? But piracy isn't theft.

This is just a moneygrab.

Re:I have a plan

[DGolden]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode, probably. How about this? (okay, the .org registry probably doesn't support that, and /.'s [link-warning] thing makes it look less cool, but some DNS might).

Re:Can you say 'Streisand effect" and mean it?

[ravenshrike]

The point was they are orders of magnitude less important than they were, except for the last.

Re:Hoist them swabies up by their own peter

[aproposofwhat]

Arrr, but you landlubbers don't know that 'peter' is old navy language for a flag - probably derived from petard, but more correct in context.

There's even a kids TV programme in the UK called Blue Peter, named after the flag that was used when a ship leaves port.

Bigger issue anyone?

[Durnsilicious]

If you take like .8 seconds to click the link and look at the related article, you'll probably be more disturbed than amused. The pirate Bay being sued is no longer a big deal. They have shown time after time that they will not shut down, what they are doing isn't exactly illegal, and it CANNOT be stopped. The artists involved want your ISPs to TRACK YOUR INTERNET ACTIVITY..... how is this not a bigger deal. The pirate bay is a fringe organization that is currently a juggernaut, fueled by broke college students and their will to change the world. But ISPs, not so fringe, not so independent, and definitely not fueled by broke college students or any will to make the world more livable. In America we should have seen this coming, patriot act and all, but Big American Douche corporations stretch overseas, so you dirty-assed foreign motherfuckers have to deal with this too. Why is what 2 washed out artists do to piss off four Swedish kids more important than 1984-esque corporate espionage on your personal activity?

Re:yeah

[bkr1_2k]

I'll not dispute that Prince comes off as greedy, but I'll mention that he gives his CDs away for free at his concerts (at least the last couple of major concerts he's done) and his general excuse for acting like an ass is actually simply control of his own music. He tends to think he's the only person capable of making his music sound good and doesn't want it diluted with a lot of bad remixes.