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Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday
Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."
http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ Is the "official"(if there is such a thing) blog about the trial.
This trial is guaranteed to be unfair even from the start. The EU has released the so called Medina report, already judging the defendants as guilty. The report was issued several weeks ago. This way the judges already know how to judge these individuals, so things are kept simple!
I guess this trial will mean that linking to copyright infringing material will be illegal. Possibly they will make it so it will be illegal if there's an intent which of course will be all the battle.
It's time to vote for the Pirate Party.
More info:
http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/MedinaOrtega_INI-report-Copyright_JURI-consolidated
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/copyright-dogmatism-ridiculously-strikes-european-parliament
Greetings from a sad Swede
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
They're charged with being accessories to a crime. The hilarious part of that is there are no criminal copyright infringement laws in Sweden.
Well, they charged DVD-Jon (not Sweden, Norway) under "hacking" laws for hacking access to his own DVDs. They spent three years trying to build a case that didn't fly, lost in two lowest courts and didn't even appeal to the Supreme Court, but it was also before the EUCD aka Euro-DMCA so now it's probably illegal here too. Unfortunatly I think the same will happen here, win or lose there'll probably be new laws to shut them down. You can only imagine the "a free haven for pirates, terrorists and kiddie porn" media campaign the RIAA/MPAA and friends will start against them. If they weren't part of the EU you'd probably hear saber rattling about trade sanctions from the US already.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Abolishing Hollywood accounting is much more urgent to the needs of starving artists than imposing draconian copyright laws.
I translated the "application for summons" a while ago. It charges the four defendants with two different crimes. (It may have been adjusted by the prosecutor since it was released, but this is the last version I've seen.)
The accusatory part (or "crime description") of the application reads (unofficial translation):
1) Complicity to copyright infringement
"The Pirate Bay is one of the worlds largest Internet filesharing services. The service utilizes the BitTorrent-protocol to achieve an efficient use of the available bandwidth. The Pirate Bay consists of three components, an index portal in the form of a web page with a search function, a database with a catalogue of torrent-files and a tracker function. Through the tracker function, a peer-to-peer network is created by the users interested in sharing the same file. All components are necessary to enable the users to share files between them. The greater part of the files which are made available for file sharing through The Pirate Bay contain copyrighted works.
The operations of The Pirate Bay are financed by advertising. Hereby, there is a commercial use of copyrighted works.
[The defendants] have together and in mutual understanding with each other and together with one other individual during 1 July 2005 - 31 May 2006 [at locations] been responsible for the organisation, administration, systematisation, programming, financing and operations of the file sharing service The Pirate Bay. In connection with these activities they have aided other persons' copyright infringements as follows:
The defendants have wilfully [during time period] [at locations] aided others in the transferring of a file over the Internet containing [name of copyrighted work], thereby making a copyrighted work available to the public and also aided other persons in manufacturing copies of the work. [Explanation why this is a copyright infringement.]
[This is repeated in a list of 21 phonograms (i.e. records/CDs), 9 films and 4 computer games shared and downloaded.]
and
2) Preparation for copyright infringement
[The defendants] have together and in mutual understanding with each other and together with one other individual during 1 July 2005 - 31 May 2006 [at locations] been responsible for the organisation, administration, systematisation, programming, financing and operations of the file sharing service The Pirate Bay.
In connection with these activities they have, by the functionality of the file sharing service, in a purpose build database with ancillary catalogue, received and stored the torrentfiles referred to [in the above list of copyrighted works]. The torrent files have been especially adapted to be used as means of assistance in the violation of the [Swedish Copyright Act]."
I haven't seen Steal this movie, but I think you got something wrong. It's not illegal for the Swedish government to be influenced by foreign governments or interests. That doesn't matter though, because the riksdag (Swedish version of parliament) is the only instance in Sweden that can change laws.
What you think about is probably the law against ministerstyre , which was broken repeatedly when the Swedish government was leaned on by the U.S. government (they don't have any respect for democratic or legal process in the U.S.A., do they).
Chapter 11. art. 7 of The (Swedish) Instrument of Government
We have a very long tradition of separating executive power and regulatory power in Sweden and this law has it's roots in medieval laws. But no such tradition seem to exist in Anglo-Saxian law. In Sweden the law is the law and regualtions are regulations, there is no exceptions, i.e. you cant' write your congressman or president to be made an exception. If a law or regulation is wonky, it has to be changed. I think Sweden has the least wonky laws and regulations in the world(*) (and they can be read and understood by a layman), so the system works.
(*) We did get a bunch of god awful byzantine shit regulations when we joined EU, that we have very small influence upon. But it's only a small body of the system.
I live in Finland and here everybody is a "pirate". That's the law. We're all guilty and can plead to be not guilty, only if we're are corporation. I've already paid for all content e.g. the piratebay can offer me.
http://www.hyvitysmaksu.fi/Teosto/hymysivut.nsf/wpages/index_en.html
Norway didn't join the EU, they joined the EFTA, the EU lite. All the disadvantages of the EU with none of the advantages.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
HOW TO GET FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE LEGALLY
1: Go to a website called XBox Live to download software for your PC. Spend some time trying to find it in among all the information about how wonderful the XBox 360 is.
2: Install this software.
3: Install updates for Fallout 3.
4: Install updates for Windows XP.
5: Reboot.
6: Create Windows Live gamer ID.
7: Enter your card details to buy Microsoft points (the download costs 800 of these, so naturally they're sold in blocks of 1000).
8: Fill in most of your address and find that it thinks you're in the USA for no apparent reason and you can't change that. (Was it because my Hotmail account had 'USA' as my region because I've never bothered to fill that stuff in since I created it eleven years ago?)
9: Give the fuck up (presumably there would have been (9) Buy points, (10) Agree to bloodthirsty EULA, (11) Download expansion, (12) Play, to go after that, but I never got that far.)
HOW TO GET FALLOUT 3: OPERATION ANCHORAGE ILLEGALLY
1: Type 'operation anchorage megaupload' into Google and pick the first result /data/ directory
2: Download it
3: Copy files into Fallout
4: Play and realise that the expansion pack actually takes less time to finish than you've just spent fucking around with Microsoft's bullshit.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Actually, if you read the paged dedicated to mocking companies that send them c&d orders, you'll see that the majority of the mocking is because lawyers are sending a bunch of Swedish guys C&D orders based on American & UK law. Since they aren't subject to those laws - and last time I checked the page, nobody had sent in a C&D quoting a valid reason using Swedish law - why shouldn't they thumb their noses at them? It's certainly what we would do in the US.