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."

Comments

News in english about the trial:

[Alsn]

http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ Is the "official"(if there is such a thing) blog about the trial.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[aliquis]

MPAA asked for 15.4 million $ earlier, don't know if that's still the number. The swedish lawyer was on TV this morning but I don't remember what she said.

When asked if it wasn't like supplying crowbars she said that the swedish limits for accessory was low and mentioned a battering where one guy had hold the other guys jacket while it was going on he was condemned for accessory assault (or whatever the english word would be.)

They also asked what would happen if TPB wasn't condemn for anything, and what would happen to the copyright and so on then, but she hadn't thought about that and it didn't existed in her mind ...

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Fluffeh]

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?

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a Swedish precedence regarding BBS style forums where copyrighted material was uploaded. The host of the BBS was acquitted, and this is what TPB has been leaning on so far.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[MoellerPlesset2]

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?

Yes, since they haven't actually distributed any copyrighted material themselves, it makes it pretty unclear in terms of the Swedish laws.
It's worth noting that they were operating for years without any action, because the prosecutors were skeptical. The reason they got raided and subsequently prosecuted was due to political pressure coming from the Minister of Justice, who in turn was being pressured by the US government. The Pirate Bay raid led to a political scandal, since Sweden has a separation of powers between the cabinet and executive branch. IOW: A minister cannot tell his department what to do directly. While Minister Bodström wasn't found to have broken the law, it may have been a contributing factor in his party losing the election later that year.

While I'm optimistic about their chances, there are some complicating factors that make it an interesting case. For one thing, they have advertising on the site and have made money off it. Since for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense in Sweden, it's a question of whether they're indirectly contributing to that crime, and are therefore accessories. I believe that's the prosecution's argument, anyway.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[guyminuslife]

1) WOTDR
2) No, for most people, it's really about free as in beer. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that for the most part, people would literally prefer free beer over free speech.

"Hey, I'll give you a free beer if you shut the fuck up about politics."
"Sounds great!"

Re:News in english about the trial:

[advocate_one]

Bzzzt wrong... when the MP3 craze kicked off, the labels were ridiculously slow off the mark providing content in the new format... if you wanted it, then you had no choice but to rip it off a CD... then when they did start providing MP3s, they weren't proper MP3s, but proprietary DRM'd low quality crap and they were still charging the full price for what was effectively low quality crapola... so people who wanted to listen without offending their ears at the horrible encoding artifacts you get from low bitrate rips, were still forced to rip their own CDs to get quality...
MP3 sharing only really took off when dialup rates improved or people got network access on college campuses...

Re:News in english about the trial:

[h4rm0ny]

You'd need to back your opinion up with some serious, verified statistics to convince me. Everyone I know who pirates (which with the exception of old people, is almost everyone I know except myself - even a musician I know pirates other people's work), they pirate because they don't want to pay. Yes, they download music they wouldn't have bought otherwise (the "no lost sales argument" so popular with piracy apologists), but they also download all the movies and music they would have bought otherwise. It even hits cinemas, as I try to get mates to go to see a movie that might interest them and get the reply "downloaded it and seen it already."

The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false. My experience directly contradicts it.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[guyminuslife]

I think it does in aggregate. I know that for plenty of things I've pirated, I've ended up generating revenue for the people involved. For instance, I pirate a lot of books. If I like a book and it's something I think I'll want later, I'll go out and buy the dead tree version. I watch BSG on Hulu nowadays and generate ad revenue for the show (and when I have money I'll buy it on DVD), but I would never have gotten into it if I had started watching broadcasts in the third season. (Who's the woman in the red dress? What's a "frakking toaster"?)

Again, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that piracy exerts a net negative force on media producers, and that for everything I can think of that got money from me because of piracy, there are a gazillion things I might have bought but didn't. But it's not *entirely* bad for them, assuming the work is quality.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Elldallan]

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.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[1u3hr]

these guys don't have a hope in hell, all the speeches about fairness in copyright won't save them. they were running a site which made millions off porn advertising and it's primary product was providing links to copyright infringement.

Google and every other search engine would be equally culpable.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded xvid / divx torrents of DVDs I already owned because ripping the content myself, and therefore bypassing CSS protection, would breach UK law.

I have 150 DVDs on an external drive which I watch movies from. I don't want to have to watch 15 minutes of trailers and warning before each movie, and I don't want to have to search through the collection for a disc which may or may not be too damaged (through use) to actually work. It's a matter of convenience. They have my money, I have my useable product. Why can't they leave it at that?

Anon for obvious reasons.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[meringuoid]

they were running a site which made millions off porn advertising

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?

Re:News in english about the trial:

[cbiltcliffe]

What does porn advertising have to do with anything?

Google provides links to infringed copyrighted content. So does Pirate Bay.
Google makes money from advertising. So does Pirate Bay.

OOoooohhhh! But Pirate Bay's advertising is PORN!!

Oh, well. That settles it, then. We find the defendant guil-cup of the charge of accessory to copyright infringement.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[L4t3r4lu5]

Pirate Bay specialises in what other people tell it exists. Google trawls everything, looking for itself.

In many ways, this makes Google more culpable, as it is doing all the legwork. TPB is just a forum where people post links.

It'd be like shutting down /. if everybody posted links to iso's of the latest Windows release.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Thaelon]

No, but DVD is an awful, user-abusive format.

Ever heard of "user prohibited actions"?

Yay, I'm forced to watch previews on a movie I paid for. And I can't skip the FBI warning. And I can't skip the stupid menu animations. How about region coding that generally forces you to buy a more expensive copy that you don't actually own?

The alternative is to download a DVD/blu-ray rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.

DVD and Blu-ray couldn't compete even if they were free.

Free may not be a format, but a non-DRMed data files are a blessedly versatile format whereas DVD & Blu-ray is incredibly restrictive by comparison.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[Grishnakh]

After all, they're advertising to pirates; why pay for porn when you can just grab a torrent of the stuff?

This is why the adult industry has done so well on the internet: they're smarter than the average businessperson.

Just because lots of porn is available illicitly doesn't mean people pirating it won't also pay for it. If someone gets hooked on some site's material, and can't get everything they want illicitly (not everything is available, and it's frequently hard to find), they may very well turn to paying the $20/month or whatever for a subscription, because it's a lot easier than trying to track it down on all the sites and places where people trade illicit copies. It might not be a majority of pirates, but it's still enough for a nice profit.

Re:News in english about the trial:

[MBGMorden]

Mod parent up. The adult industry (or at least the vast majority of it), seems to understand that people will buy some stuff and pirate others. If anything is heavily torrented on the net, it's porn. Tons of it. I certainly download tons of it. And from that, I start to notice certain girls that I'm interested in. Faye Valentine, Scarlett Pain, Jenna Haze, Eve Lawrence, etc, etc. The list goes on for a long time, and it's a list that I've formed primarily from seeing these girls in pirated content. That said, once I notice a girl that I like I'll had on over to IAFD.com and look up what movies she's been in, and in particular, if she's done any scenes with another girl that I particularly like. Due to the sheer volume of porn produced, a lot of the videos that I lookup like this simply aren't going to be on a torrent site. Sure it has a lot of porn, but it doesn't have THAT video. So, I head on over to a Neflix-like subscription service that I pay for, and put the movie in question down in my queue. Once it comes in I rip it, and send it back. I also subscribe to a pay website that posts random DVD's each day (5 per day specifically, split by scenes), and will download stuff off of there just fine.

Now, here's the thing: I'm not paying for every little piece of content I obtain. It doesn't work that way. What I AM doing though, is putting, along with many other people, plenty enough money into this industry for it to survive, and make a healthy profit while doing so. Porn companies make up for this with relatively low production costs, but honestly, their pay is much closer to reality. Most of the female talent makes a few thousand tops for a movie. Virtually nobody is going to pull more than $25k-30k, but then again: why should they? Why should Tom Cruise make $15+ million for working on a movie for 4-5 months? Sure, it's because "he brings in that much in revenue", but that's only true because of the artificial nature in which copyright law has propped up that whole industry. Allowed to run a natural course, an actor's salary would actually start to look sane again. Now, a lot of the big name blockbuster's like Titanic wouldn't be possible without such strict copyright laws, but honestly, why should we legislate people's freedom's so strictly just so that we can get heavy special effects? People put on plays, and did it well, for centuries before the video camera was invented. They certainly can continue to do so with a video camera rolling, and still product plenty of content.

The music industry is even worse. There, music quality is simply a measure of the talent of the artists. You don't need particularly expensive budgets simply to lay a good track down - you simply need good talent. Again though, a talented musician shouldn't magically make 300x what a talented carpenter makes simply because the carpenter has to deal with the unchangable laws of nature while the musician gets carefully crafted laws to make sure he (and only he) can keep copying his now infinite resource.

End Copyright

[QuantumG]

When a law does more harm than good it needs to be abolished.

Similarly, please end drug prohibition laws.

ktnxbye.

Re:End Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but other governments (US/UK) are probably lobbying and influencing Swedish lawmakers significantly enough to crack down on Pirates that aren't breaking any nation laws.

The majority of the movies pirated are US and UK films...who is really holding this trial?

Re:End Copyright

[Danse]

Neither of these do more harm than good. If you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table, you would be thinking differently about copyright laws. Similarly, if you had really been affected by drug abuse whether personally or by those close to you, you wouldn't be spouting such jibberish about ending it.

Right. If you've been affected by drug abuse, then you should realize exactly how useless and counter-productive drug prohibition is.
As for copyright, there's a huge gap between what serves artists and the ridiculous laws we have today. I believe there's a place for copyright law, but that it needs to be made sensible again before anyone will respect it.

Re:End Copyright

[Ethanol-fueled]

If you had content (a song for example) that was a method for you to put food on the table...

The RIAA and MPAA are obsolete organizations which exist for existence's own sake, much like cancer. They pull food out of the mouths of those they represent just to feed themselves.

Similarly, if you had really been affected by drug abuse whether personally or by those close to you, you wouldn't be spouting such jibberish about ending it

Because Americans want to pay thousands of their tax dollars to incarcerate one nonviolent person for possession of marijuana. And there's nothing like a bitter, violent, now-won't-get-a-job-on-the-outside-no-second-chances prison experience to help meth and coke addicts break the behavior which serves nobody but the salaries of the prison industrial complex. Idiot.

Freudian slip?

[underworld]

From TFA: "Premises connected to The Pirate Bay were first raided in 2006. The complexity of the case led to delays in charges being filed and the case being bought to court."

Re:And now...

[Fluffeh]

I would like to call Pirate #4 to the witness stand Your Honor...

Pirate 4: Yaaarrrr?

Re:Torrents are just tools.

[Doctor_Jest]

Yet they keep trying. (Just like the anti-gun nuts) I'm certainly getting sick and tired of it all, myself. You can find some nice out-of-print things on torrents, and with no DRM at the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3 store anymore, there's little incentive to get most music via torrents.

But, whatever your view on torrents and filesharing in general, it will happen even with draconian witch-hunts and overzealous (and in the US Unconstitutional) legislation and police action. And yes, I'm going to say it... the world has more pressing matters than to persecute filesharers. When you (collective government and media cartels) have solved ALL OTHER PROBLEMS in the world, maybe we'll let you finish off the whole copyright witch hunt. (I said MAYBE, asswads.) But until then, stop it. :)

If there's something someone wants (think China, South America, etc) and it's overpriced even for the US, it's going to be bootlegged and sold on the streets. China's not doing anything (in spite of the good show they put on last year) to combat this sort of thing because they don't give two ape-shits about American and European "copyrights". But they persist, like the war on Drugs, trying to eradicate something that will never go away. It's like putting toothpaste back in the tube, but they insist on wasting money. Hey, if it were all their money, I'd probably not be so irritated... but the money belongs to the creators, yet it's going to this political bullshit (like the "traffic monitoring" provisions snuck into the stimulus bill here in the States). I guess the 4th Amendment is really dead now. "Because it's for the children."

Pirate translators needed

[Mystery00]

Some Swedish translators should add subtitles and put it up on The Pirate Bay.

Political trial

[castrox]

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

Heros

[CranberryKing]

to the true spirit of freedom. This is the actual front for liberty today. What guts. Lots of talk, but not many are willing to take a stand like these guys.

Re:The scary thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

This should've been included in that 'You Are Not A Laywer' thing the other day, about legal fallacies 'techies' make.
Understanding how bittorrent and bittorrent trackers work is quite easy. Heck, there are explanations in the newspaper all the time.
Given an explanation your average person can easily understand it. Judges and lawyers tend to be a bit smarter than your average person. Add to that that it's their job to understand new situations all the time.

I think that if you go read actual rulings in these cases, you might be surprised at the depth of understanding you can find.
For one, you could well go check out the Norwegian DeCSS case ruling, which the prosecution lost. The judge had no problems understanding how CSS worked, or what the consequences were for issues like competition and fair-use rights.

Re:And now...

[commodoresloat]

I would like to call Pirate #4 to the witness stand Your Honor...

Pirate 4: Yaaarrrr?

Swedish judge: bork bork bork!

Win-win for Pirate Bay

[Spunken]

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.

Re:Geez...

[meringuoid]

There isn't piracy because there's DRM, there's DRM because there's piracy.

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
2: Download it
3: Copy files into Fallout /data/ directory
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.

Yep

[Sycraft-fu]

That's one of the reasons I don't have such a problem with copyright infringement is that copyright has become so stupid.

Remember that in the US copyright was originally 14 years or rather 7 + 7 (7 when you registered, extensible by another 7). Now this was seen as good enough back when the world was large. By that I mean it took a long time for information to move. If one wrote and published a book in New York, it could be a long time, years perhaps, before someone on the west coast got to buy it.

Now the world is very small. Information moves instantly across the globe. It is trivial to release something to the whole world at the same time. IT is easy to reach all your potential audience very quickly.

Well if anything, you'd think this would mean shorter copyrights. However it hasn't. Copyright is now life plus 50 years. Apparently just being able to sell your work for your entire life isn't good enough, you need to be able to keep collecting money after you are dead.

Now that's retarded especially since the Constitution doesn't grant unlimited right for copyright. Congress is allowed to create copy right law to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." The whole reason they are allowed to do it is because we want to promote science and art. So that means you give someone exclusive rights for a time so they can make money, and thus have an economic incentive to create. However it does not mean they should have rights for an unlimited time for three reasons:

1) If someone can release one thing and use that as a gravy train for life, what is the economic incentive to keep creating? In other fields, people must keep working to keep making money, why should art be different?

2) It stands in the way of progress. Part of the progress of the arts (and science) is building off of that which came before you. Disney is a great example, some of their most beloved movies are based off of old fables. Well if people can't do that, it stands in the way of progress.

3) It runs contrary to the Constitution which says "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Note the "limited times" part. It doesn't say forever. The idea here is you get to have exclusive rights for a little bit, then everyone gets it, like with patents.

So given the absurd state of copyright law, I have trouble thinking that those that break it are all that bad. Copyright law has reached a totally bullshit state, and a bad law really shouldn't be a law at all. If copyright was more reasonable, well then maybe I'd be more willing to condemn those that break it. However as far as I'm concerned current copyright law is downright unconstitutional and thus should be struck down.