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MPAA Seeks $15 Million From The Pirate Bay
praps writes "Having tasted blood with its victory over TorrentSpy, the MPAA is now stepping up its attack on The Pirate Bay. The association is claiming damages of over $15 million, based on The Pirate Bay's distribution of four films and a TV series — Harry Potter, The Pink Panther, Syriana, Walk the Line and the first season of Prison Break. The Swedish court is unlikely to be as generous as the one in California, although the four Pirate Bay founders are already facing charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law."
TorrentSpy, in the meantime, has declined to pay the settlement awarded to the MPAA on Wednesday. In addition to appealing the decision, they have filed for bankruptcy.
TorrentSpy's big problem was the destruction of evidence.
http://www.google.com/search?q=torrentspy+destruction+of+evidence
Once they did that, the Judge essentially said "we can't have a real trial, you're guilty"
No legal precedent was set in the TorrentSpy case, because no legal analysis of any copyright claims happened.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm puzzled about whether the pirate bay guys are just attention seekers, or if they are actually willing to potentially screw up the rest of their lives for this cause.
They must have seen it coming and they've had a lot of time to back down.
Either way, big balls.
I'm no lawyer, but first of all they certainly won't be able to pay since the numbers are RIAA pulled out of the ass, "we lost this much" numbers and hence one or two orders of magnitude above any real figure.
However, this shouldn't matter since the chance that they are found liable is probably rather small ( "assisting copyright infringement" is not a crime in Swedish law, yet that is what they are being sued for ).
Now if they are found liable anyway, it would still be the company that is held responsible. The individuals in question probably would not suffer from it at all, and even if they killed all of their servers it would just be weeks ( if not days ) before somebody else created a similar page with slightly different implementation, thus forcing a new investigation and court process.
Even if the RIAA do win this case all they achieve is make TPB into martyrs and ensure that whoever succeed them will be even more difficult to stop.
That's a really idealized vision of the system.
Capitalism is a game in which buyers and sellers are oppenents.
Saying "the market decides" means that the power is all in the hands of the buyers: that's when you can say that "the market will make better products appear": better meaning better for the buyer. This is the ideology which justifies capitalism: the people are the buyers, and the law are (supposed to be) made for the people's sake.
But this is just one extreme in the balance of power between the two players; and just finding a good example for it is difficult. The best one is probably gas stations: you know exactly what you are buying, and you can easily check an other one, so the margins are (I guess) pretty low.
But in many cases, the balance weights heavily toward the seller. We all know the reasons: using people's mistakes (lottery, complicated billing), forced buying (bundling, etc), monopoly (or any alliance of sellers against buyers), control of the information, control of the law (lobbying).
All thoses are limitted or forbidden by the law, because they all go against the people's interest. Even marketing, when you think about it, is pretty absurd since it openly tries to make a deal seem better than it really is for buyer.
The only moral justification you can think of to allow marketing is that a company will only have the money to run ads if it is successful; this takes for granted that success is mostly the result of the company's real usefulness to the people.
In short, marketing is only justified if it does not change the relative success of companies!
(Note: you can't justify marketing just by freedom of speech, which is intended for cases when the law should stay neutral in the fight between two parties, as in a trial; there is no reason not to favor the people against the sellers. Except for international competitivity; it's often an easy excuse, but it's a valid point and a wider discussion).
Of course, the other cases (monopoly, bundling) are even harder to justify; but the worse is certainly lobbying. The simple idea that sellers could affect the law is utterly absurd, and lobbying is the best indicator of the power balance. In France -and I guess most countries- it's simply called corruption (which does not mean it doesn't happen).
And by the way: the internet has the potential to take a lot of power away from the sellers. Before Ebay, some companies made profit just by providing the organisation that buyers lacked.
Things can really change; that is, if we don't let them rewrite the laws too much with the power they have left.
1, 2, 3... Fight!
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Today on Big Brother: Winston finally comes to love Big Brother and then gets shot in the back of the head. The rest of the housemates fight over how to divvy up his possessions.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."