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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."
TPB is just a torrent hosting site. Torrents are tools, just like guns - they can be used for piracy or downloading copies of a game a person lost. And the whole issue of being "accessories" of copyright infringement is pointless, like suing the gun companies if a murderer killed some one with one of their guns.
I thought that they had long ago tested the laws (and won) on whether the site was legal and how they couldn't end up in the slammer for this?
Even in interviews in mags and the like, they certainly came across as super-positive about potential legal issues?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The scary thing is that because most judges and courts don't have a clue about what a tracker is or does they might well find them guilty of something they aren't actually doing. What's next? Google and Yahoo being sued for copyright infringement?
Fair enough, but isn't it possible the owners of a site called "The Pirate Bay" might be aware of what they are facilitating for their users?
For most people it isn't about free as in beer, but rather, as Richard Stallman might say free as in freedom (although for the record he has stated that he will not own DVDs that have DRM which so far is very few published DVDs, "Freedom Downtime" from 2600 Magazine is about the only one that I can think of right now although there probably are a handful of other mainly obscure titles). If I purchase a movie then I expect to be able to make backup copies, format shift, watch on any device of my choosing in private or in the company of friends, skipping to any point on the DVD at any time (i.e. no "prohibited" operations, mandatory commercial previews, FBI warnings, and other assorted bullshit), lending the movie to my friends, as I would a book or CD, and generally enjoying my purchase in any way that I wish short of public performance or distribution. For example, I don't expect to have the right to project the movie on a screen in a public park as some people have been known to do where I live. Apparantely, that is too much to ask which is a major reason why I haven't bought any DVDs for about a year now (I have rediscovered reading, outdoor activites, and other forms of entertainment that do not involve the MAFIAA) nor have I downloaded pirated copies. I have a very low opinion of Hollywood in general and most of their movies, especially their more recent works, in particular. In fact, most of my current DVD collection consists of documentaries on various subjects, a very few hollywood films (generally in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre, LOTR trilogy for example), and some anime (I am a fan of GITSAC and Miyazaki). I probably fit some typical Slashdot profile I suppose, but I just expect to have control over my own property and if I pay for something then it is my property damnit and all of that shrink-click-wrap license agreement bull can kiss my ass as far as I am concerned. The only reason we have crap such as "license agreement" is because of lawyers and lawsuits and consumers who are too meek to grow a pair, stand up, and demand their property rights. As long as people let companies like the MAFIAA members get away with this kind of crap then they will keep claiming ever more "rights" for themselves until somebody pushes back and tells them "no". Of course, Hollywood always donates heavily to the Democratic party and the MAFIAA has placed their goons in the Department of Justice, courtesy of the Obama Administration, so don't expect any "change that you can believe in" anytime soon on copyright or DMCA reform. Obama had better watch those MAFIAA goons he put in charge at the Department of Justice, they are a potentially massive PR liability just waiting to boil over with the young internet savy voters who pounded the pavement on the campaign trail and kept the blogs and tweets going to put him in office. Talk about slapping your supporters in the face...sheesh.
That may be true, but new laws regarding aiding in copyright infringement have been introduced in recent years and TPB's activities haven't been tested against those until now.
Although I suppose the TPB crew will win this, there is a chance they won't.
people get physically addicted to hard drugs. it changes chemicals in your brain. Are you so addicted to britney spears and adobe photoshop that you need to torrent them?
Or are you suggesting that the reason people with $300 iphones pirate $1.99 iphone games is due to addiction?
Nothing to do with being a cheapass, I'm sure.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
IANAL.
This trial is not something that will be resolved quickly, I expect it to take around 5 years atleast since it will almost certainly appealed up to and including the Supreme Court and possibly even further going over to the EU court.
Nothing of significance is ever resolved at the 'Tingsrätten'(approximate equivalent to a district court) since the only individual in the court with a law degree(except for the lawyers on each side ofcourse) is the judge, the other members of the court are selected citizens of good standing.
The legal grounds in this case is shaky at best but should they be found guilty the fines and reparations will be nowhere near the requested amounts because The Pirate Bay founders are not beeing charged with accessory to commercial scale infringement but with several specific infringements and there's a roof as to high the fines for each infringement can go.
The Committee on Legal Affairs says in the report labeled "REPORT on the outlook for copyright in the EU":
48. Approves the action taken by various national judicial systems against internet sites that
illegally disseminate works on line (e.g. "The Pirate Bay");
This is from (PDF-warning) http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A6-2009-0017+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
Which in my view is equivalent to judge The Pirate Bay without any legal trial. It's not some hippie committee on agriculture or whatever. Writing like this just shows they've already made up their mind before trial. Mind you, I realize this is an EU committee, but in case you haven't noticed, Sweden has been following the EU's advice quite throroughly lately.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
They go by bus from Belgrade to Stockholm.
They cross Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, a bit of Czech Republic and Poland..
Of those countries only Slovakia uses Euro as currency.
Still, the PB team is sooo surprised that they can't pay in Euro... they obviously also don't know that you can exchange Euro for local currency in bank or foreign exchange shop.
Today we have been travelling through [...] Poland we discovered didn't accept euros.
Then a bit later:
Stuck in a gas station. They don't accept euros
And once again:
We had to shift the booking around a bit since they didn't accept euro so three of us are now looking forward to 18 hours on the [...] boat with nowhere to sleep.
Welcome to the real world ;-)
Swedish newspapers are saying either PB wins the trial and are free, or they lose and become martyrs.
After the raid on the PB servers (which led to this trial) memberships of the Pirate Party trippled.
A conviction (especially a prison sentence) will lead to an outrage that would completely erase the precious little good will the music and movie industry have with young people today. At least in Sweden.
You could probably make money by doing tours of your hometown doing live software support, though.
It'd be interesting to see your working there. I can't imagine that the porn sites pay much for their advertising. After all, they're advertising to pirates; why pay for porn when you can just grab a torrent of the stuff? And that's before you ask whether the ads are seen at all. It's not as if a pirate is going to think 'Oh my - if I visit this ad-supported website with Adblock Plus switched on, that's like stealing' now, is it?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's also about formats, though. I download TV shows from TPB, and you know what? I can watch every single one of those shows for free with my bunny ears, but I refuse to be tied to a TV schedule. For me, TPB is the 21st century version of a VCR.
Luckily, up here in Canada, CTV and their subsidiaries have realized that they can broadcast on the Internet, make money off of advertising (business as usual, for them) and their customers won't be robbed by the cable companies.
Now, if only Hulu would extend their contracts to other countries.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
I mean, I can see the argument here as to why it should be illegal given the laws as written. From my CS perspective, they're aiding in transmission of a file.
I think it's time for darknets.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
So why not get the RIAA into your pockets?
Buy one share in all the RIAA companies and bitch at the share holders meetings as much as you want. You're a share holder and they have to listen to you.
Get enough share holders together and you can force the company to change. Ask them questions like why they are wasting our [shareholders] money on lawsuits instead of new markets.
If you want to beat them you got to play them at their own game.
You need to back your opinion up with some serious, verified statistics to convince me, too. Everyone I know who pirates (which with the exception of old people, is almost everyone I know including myself) pirate because what they want to see or hear isn't offered in an acceptable format or distribtution channel. I WANT TO PAY, badly. I would love to give someone my money for the stuff I want if it was fair at all. But it isn't. I discover awesome stuff trough "piracy" and in the last year alone I bought about a dozen DVDs of TV shows and movies just because I could watch them for free first to see if I like it. Every time I buy something without checking it out I run the risk of regretting it later on and cutting back even more on my spending because of this. Yes I do download TV-shows that I could watch on TV if I lived in four different countries at once. Then when I bring it up I am told to buy a 30$ DVD of a TV series that hasn't even finished running or install iTunes on my Linux machine. D'oh. Since they broadcast them publicly and only sell them to my country years later with a terrible dub I'd go for the pirated channels. I buy DVDs that I never heard of before if it wasn't for the pirates (the "lost sales" argument therefore is only partially true with DRM fascism apologists), but I also download movies and music that I NEVER would have bought otherwise. In fact I didn't even know I could buy them. It has to hit cinemas, these overpriced noisy uncomfortable outdated ways of distributing and watching movies has to go. Whenever a mate asks me to go to the cinema and see a dubbed version of a almost guaranteed crap movie I reply "I already downloaded the enjoyable original version, why don't you come over to my place where we can hit Pause and Smoke and whatever without some bastard throwing popcorn at you".
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is true. To a company not winning your customers over with content or not winning them over with your service and content as a package comes down to the same. The amount of money "not earned" from people that don't give you money and those that download and don't give you money is exactly 0 and the very same. Only when you start to fantasize about how great it would be to get all the money from the black market then you start to see ominous numbers and want a piece of that action. That is like BMW/Ford/Toyota going "we don't sell as many cars as a few years ago when they still did what people wanted and who now rather drive cheaper foreign cars. We need to get all other cars banned and have a way to force people into buying what we want since their cars run on the same spare parts and tires as ours. If we could only get all the revenue that is illegally generated in the black market to be ours." That's what you want. Instead of changing the way they confront pirates by offering systems that are more comfortable and superior means of equal distribution (how about simultaneous global releases for a start) they are looking for ways to force customers into paying money for something they don't need. If you can get it for free, you might take it. Just as true as the argument that the companies refuse to adapt their sales models to the 21st century and serve the customers they have driven away and now call "criminals". My experience directly proves that.
If someone asked me if I would have bought everything that I downloaded in the last year (which is a LOT) I would say "Nay, it isn't even sold and I couldn't afford it, that's why I'm downloading it. But you would also lose out on the money I DID pay because that I also couldn't spend if it wasn't for things I saved earlier."
So you, as an industry, gotta ask yourself a question. Do you feel lucky? Do you want to keep bullying consumers into shelling out cash they don't have for all kinds of crap or live with the fact that there is a market that you COULD use for your own advantage by making your products and services once again interesting and enticin
I refer to usenet and torrent sites as a Tivo with a time machine (can grab the past, and in some lucky cases the future).
I still pay cable, I still use netflix, I still pay for Pay Per View, I even buy CD's, MP3s, and now iTunes plus. Also, I spend a hundred a year with O'reilly buying e-books for personal growth in areas that will never be applicable to my job (I rarely purchased paper books do to shipping lag, now I pay extra and get both).
All of this and I still subscribe to usenet, and download a good deal of Music (stuff not available DRM free and not wanted shipping/shopping lag), TV shows (stuff not available on demand), movies (sometimes I really want to see something that is only in theatres, and I don't have the money, The in theatres on demand has helped), books (I can't buy every technical book I want to read only the first chapter or so of).
So I will say I am about 50/50 on the free as in beer and freedom as in convenient aspects, but I really am not skimping on what I would pay.
My spending on these items (annually) is probably still $700 (ouch, it's painful to calculate), and is unlikely to go up without the availability of free content (perhaps the $50 or so a year I spend in usenet would be used to purchase a little extra music, though emusic.com has been dominating the music budget, and is pretty much enough).
There is a lot going on here, but it is not simply a bunch of people wanting stuff for free. It is a bunch of people wanting stuff for free AND a bunch of people wanting Freedom AND a bunch of people wanting convenience AND a bunch of people making ethical stands of other types AND a bunch of people with a combination of the above.
With all that working against the current model I expect to see in the short term future
1) lower paid actors (a huge expense now)
2) lower production values
3) product placement and lots of merchandise
I hope the writing, acting and directing stays decent, but only time will tell. There will be success in the industry still, just expect more kids movies like "Spy Kids" for example.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Isn't there double jeopardy in sweden?
Not in the US sense, an appeal is considered a continuation of an existing trial. The upside is that precedents are set much faster, if the prosecution disagrees on points of law it usually arrives at the Supreme Court on the first case and from there they're bound by whatever precedent is set. That way the government can't so easily harass people with far-fetched charges like you could in the US since no conviction means no appeals which means no precedent. It does rather suck to be first though.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I get torrents of TV shows that I miss. I have a DVD recorder, but in all honesty it is easier to download it and burn it to a DVDRW to watch later.
I also download kids shows/movies. I have downloaded movies that I own on DVD, because it's easier and they are good quality. Why? Because I have a DVD player that has a USB port, and a 120GB hard drive connected. If you have kids, you know that switching out DVDs is a pain, and they get messed up. I put them all on a hard drive, and it's SO much more convenient.
There ARE legitimate uses for downloads, although I know there are people out there who just want it for free. But instead of embracing downloads almost a decade ago like they should have, the RIAA (and now the MPAA) are still fighting it. I don't know if it's out of pride or ignorance, but downloads aren't going away.
And the MPAA/RIAA are still around, and they've been making money this whole time... so .. what's the problem?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
In 1994 we joined the European Economic Area (EEA) and became part of the EUs "inner market". We are required to implement all EU directives unless we make a veto, which we haven't done in 15 years and 8000+ directives. For ten years it was a good agreement since we weren't full members and weren't paying the full cost, but since 2004 we've been nothing but shafted. We are very close to being a non-voting member, part of almost every program including even the EU border program, from Norway you travel freely to all EU countries but with absoutely no influence no matter what our government claims.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The basic premise of the linked posting is that conservativism starts from the idea that aristocracy is a good thing -- not necessarily kings and queens and dukes and duchesses, but rather an upper class, the rich, those that have enough money and power to not have to work. People further down the social ladder that ascribe to this philosophy, despite possibly being actively harmed by it, do so in the hopes that they too might some day climb high enough to be able to sit back and rely on other people to do the work.
Copyright-forever comes out of this same thinking.
I think this article you read is a little lopsided in its thinking.
I believe in a lot of conservative principles myself (old-school conservative, not this new neo-con BS that's taken over the US Republican party in the last couple decades). The main principle is limited government, along with fiscal responsibility. For the economic bit you're talking about, the idea is that it should be possible for you to work hard and become rich through your efforts, without some big government taxing you to death and "redistributing" your wealth to people who don't want to work very hard, or make stupid choices in life. People further down the social ladder that ascribe to this philosophy do so because they want to be able to build themselves up the same way.
Most people would like to be able to accumulate enough money so they don't have to work any more. I know I would: I'd rather work on whatever interests me, regardless of profit potential, rather than constantly worry about money. But for now, I work for an employer because I haven't quite figured out a way to be independently wealthy and I'd like to have food, clothing, and shelter. If I had my choice, I'd certainly be doing something more interesting than my current job. My point here is that you shouldn't condemn someone because they want to reach a point where they don't have to work for a living any more. There's nothing wrong with that: if you can work hard for a while and build up so much money that you can live off that for the rest of your life, then what's the problem? If the government takes that money away, then that removes the incentive for that person to work so hard, and instead do the minimum.
People further down the social ladder that ascribe to this philosophy, despite possibly being actively harmed by it, do so in the hopes that they too might some day climb high enough to be able to sit back and rely on other people to do the work.
Most people would like to retire at some point, when they get older. Do you want to be doing back-breaking work when you're 90 years old so that you can pay your bills? Of course not; when people get that old, they should be retired, and younger people should be doing the work. That's the payback they get for working hard when they were younger. (And remember, not everyone's smart enough or lucky enough to be able to do non-physical work.)
I guess anyone who's not conservative doesn't believe in retirement, and thinks that elderly people should be out digging ditches?
It isn't about creating an aristocracy; it's about allowing people to reap the benefits and rewards of their hard work, without having a bunch of lazy people steal it from them. If everyone worked hard, then theoretically everyone could be "upper class", though not all at the same time: the young people would be forced to work hard, so that they could build themselves up so they could retire relatively young. (However, today's trend where parents with money constantly throw money at their lazy kids, enabling them to be worthless slugs, goes against this ideal.)
Now, the copyright question is a little more difficult, because that's a place where the government grants creators a limited (well, it used to be limited) monopoly over the ability to copy a work, with the idea that it would encourage people to spend more effort creating useful works of art and literature (and now software). After all, if you spend all y