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.

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: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: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.