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Pirate Bay Day 3 — Defense Requests Dismissal
Hodejo1 writes "Yesterday was a big day for the Pirate Bay when half of the charges against them were dropped leaving only the lesser charges of assisting making copyrighted material available in place. TorrentFreak is following the English twitter feed of the trial in the wee hours of the night, documenting more missteps by the prosecution. 'The Pirate Bay trial is moving forward rapidly and again the day in court has ended early. On the third day the prosecution presented the amended charges. The defendants all called for acquittal while Carl Lundström's lawyer scored points with the already legendary "King Kong" defense.'"
.... think again. while i don't think these guys are innocents by a long shot, asking for jail time was always bullcrap.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Tell me about the King Kong defence. Please compare and contrast it to the Chewbacca defence, to provide an adequate frame of reference.
- There is no point, it's like a sphere -
Don't read too much into half the charges being dropped, its common practice
The nitty-gritty begins about now.
Whoa, you think that the US has that much pull on the Swedish courts? I doubt it. TBP is clearly winning the case thus far. I expect them to win, regardless of the United States not liking it.
The bosses of the entertainment industry(no, not that "liberal media" bullcrap) are to the democrats as the oil industry is the republicans. Same shit different name.
What?
I'm sorry you can't make a coherent argument, cause without one there's nothing to discuss.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Am I the only one whose mind is boggling at how the prosecution thinks that phrase works? Is there a law that says you can't post complaints against you or respond to them in a way that might make the complainer look like an ass? I understand things like libel and slander, but does "loss of goodwill" prohibit me from pointing out that Sony's inclusion of rootkits in their products might be considered a negative?* If Sony wants to prevent "loss of goodwill," they should be suing themselves.
*instead of the wonderful feature that it is, of course.
I've been hanging around Slashdot for over ten years, and "legendary 'King Kong' defense" has to be the most link-worthy phrase I've ever seen.
Because I'm not new here, I'm not at all surprised it isn't linked in the summary.
-Peter
They appeal. They will win in the higher courts, because there isn't a case according to any sane interpretation of Swedish law.
But the laws can be changed, swiftly and easily, in a country that doesn't have a constitutional court or supreme court. Especially when said country is member of a union that can, more or less, dictate laws to it's member states.
It's our right as human beings to rip off artists and not pay them, and it's totally awesome for Pirate Bay to run a torrent tracker that connects users so that they can distribute file chunks to each other.
Well, awesomeness is what the courts are ruling on, isn't it? Ever since Brown v. Board of Education was settled with a crocodile-punching contest, there's been a precedent.
The name of the site alone implies it's true purpose.
Aw c'mon -- pirates are fun and wholesome! Disney! Pirates of the Caribbean! Johnny Depp! Yarrr matey!
Yes! It's only a matter of time until Slashdot's heroes, the Pirate Bay operators, get away with this. It's our right as human beings to rip off artists and not pay them, and it's totally awesome for Pirate Bay to run a torrent tracker that connects users so that they can distribute file chunks to each other.
FUCK artists, and FUCK their rights. They are our slaves. We don't owe them a dime for their work. Long live, Pirate Bay, and enjoy the victory, guys!
So if H&K or Smith&Wesson were ever to be charged with making the guns used to kill people, and were acquited... logically you would say:
Yes! Its only a matter of time until Slashdot's heroes the, the manufacturers of guns, get away with this. It's our right as human beings to shoot people in the face, and its totally awesome for gun manufacturers to run a production chain that connects users to guns so they can buy weapons for eachother.
Fuck people I want to shoot in the face, and fuck their rights. They are our slaves. We don't owe them not shooting them in the face. Long live gun manufacturers, and enjoy the victory guys!
See what I did there? Copyright infringement may not be legal (murder sure isn't), but simply being peripherally involved in the crime, by providing, say, the very instruments used to commit it provided you aren't directly participating in anything criminal,... well shucks... that isn't actually illegal.
If you want to stop copyright infringement, convince the people actually downloading copies that what they are doing is wrong. Senselessly prosecuting gun manufacturers and torrent indexes for what end users do with them really isn't ever going to be very effective, because the murderers and infringers aren't even the ones affected.
The good news is that you don't need to fill your car up with entertainment to get to work.
If the lawyers for the plantiff developed a statistical model about the net impact of PB downloads on sales, their case would be more palatable to the public. Of course, that could show a net gain in sales due to the free publicity PB downloads provide.
Hmm, so I suppose that a site named "Auschwitz Camping" automatically means that they secretly kill people?
Piratbyran ("The Piracy Bureau") is a Swedish organization (or think tank) established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property â" by freely sharing information and culture.
=
[The Pirate Bay] Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau)...
And being indifferent about infringing content (according to other countries), doesn't automatically make their purpose infringement.
...Pirate Bay cannot claim that it serves a larger legitimate and legal forum for free content...
Yes it can, it doesn't promote "illegal" content, and it doesn't promote "legal" content, just "content", it's the users who choose to add "illegal" content, some of which reside (some purposefully) in countries that are more lax, or have none of the same infringement/copyright laws.
Yeah the entertainment industry. Who wants that?
Seriously people. The media companies may have gotten out of hand. But let's be honest, the pirate bay IS assisting in copyright infringement. They may be legally in the clear. But it's really a technicality. I use bittorrent. I want fair copyright reform. I want rational penalties for breaking the law to fit the crime. Like the $20 parking ticket I get for failing to pay at a meter. But I also want the media companies to be protected.
Piracy may be grossly exagerated, but also is a real problem. The media companies may be stupid and behind the times but their concern is valid. Their product is becoming worthless before their eyes. The position of the government SHOULD BE to protect the property of its citizens. Without strong copyright law the GPL would be meaningless. What if someone contracted you to write code for them on a GPL project and then decides not to pay? How is that any different from taking code and using it without permission? Would you expect the government to protect your property?
Everyone says musicians should be making their money from concerts. Ok. Well what if people jump the gate and sneak into concerts? It's 'free' to the artists your presence isn't taking anything from them. Should the government not be on the side of the artist in that case?
The media companies have screwed up HUGE. They've violated laws. They've abused their influence to futily attempt to stop the inevitable tide of free but they're also attempting to defend something which SHOULD be defended.
They've gained too many rights. They've overstepped what they should be allowed. But that doesn't mean their rights should be thrown out either.
The media industry is one of our largest exports. It's an industry that does employ a great number of people whose work does deserve to be protected. The punishment no longer fits the crime but let's not raise piracy onto some elevated pedestal of justice.
"Ohhh but pirate bay can provide legal software as well." Yes. It can... but does it? I've never gone there to aquire somethign legally. It's called the PIRATE bay. They aren't about 'freedom' or 'justice'. They're about profiting through ad sales from providing copyrighted works. They aren't guilty of any crime but that doesn't make their service any more upstanding or deserving of respect.
They're just as low as the media companies sueing them in my opinion. I hardly think that the US protecting one of its largest exports is a bad position for the US government to take.
If they make too many cars, those cars are going to get cheaper.
The huge glut of entertainment that has developed means that 99% of artists won't get a dime for their work.
Huge corporations that have the backing of the government will.
But even they are seeing enormous drops in revenue (and not because of piracy-- but because the middle class has no money left (the rich have it all) and after you spend your $300 to $1200 a year on entertainment, you are done- even IF the government kills people who infringe- no one except the wealthy can legally fill even a small IPOD).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
While I agree with you that here in the US with Obama appointing people to the peak of law enforcement we're in a bad way, this trial isn't in the US. It's in Sweden. Different strokes for different folks.
The Pirate party is actually a political force in Sweden. In particular the salient points of their platform were adopted by several political parties in the last election due to a groundswell of support. We could learn from them. They're in no danger.
Now I've posted enough on-topic stuff. Let's have an excerpt from TFA:
Sony complained in court that The Pirate Bay never remove torrents on copyright holders request, but that they have the ability to do so since they remove torrents that are named in a way that doesn't reflect the material they link to. They note that The Pirate Bay has a bad attitude to complaints and ridicules the complainer.
Aw... the pirate bay makes fun of takedown requests and that makes Sony sad. I think there's something in my eye.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
From TFA:
For the song "Let it Be" by The Beatles, IFPI is asking for 10 times the damages, since the band's music isn't officially available online. Interesting logic here - perhaps if The Beatles music was made officially available, people wouldn't even need to pirate it.
Since I only buy music online, now (yes, I really do pay for music), and only if it works in Linux (yes, I really do use Linux to play music I pay for), it seems that if the owner of the Beatles song "Let it Be" doesn't offer it online and playable in Linux, then they don't count me in as part of their potential market. So if I download that song, there is no loss of sale, since there wouldn't be a sale were I to not download it, because there can't be a sale if they won't sell to the tiny fractional minority market I'm in (people who only buy music online for playing in Linux).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
With or without excessive copyright, artists will lose. With copyright, they don't own their work and just feed off the crap their publisher feeds them. Without it, they can't own their work, and get money primarily though donations and events that don't rely on intellectual property being owned.
i guess people are taking this to a new level to show the pictures of people who pirate http://filesharer.org/
Unlike Google or Yahoo, the Pirate Bay cannot claim that it serves a larger legitimate and legal forum for free content
O RLY?
Likewise, they refuse to remove content that is knowingly infringing (and taunt the owners when they are asked to remove it)
Usually, they are not asked. They are commanded. Under the authority of a law that does not apply in their country. How would you react if some Chinese group ordered you (as a non-Chinese citizen hosted outside China) to remove a blog entry mocking the Chinese government, because such blog entries are illegal in China.
(I was going to use that asian country that has laws against insulting the royal family, but I don't remember the name of the county.)
US is somewhat secondary. Sweden is an EU memeber. The EU has views on the subject of copyright.
If you think the Slashdot crowd hasn't been making any sensible arguments (either pro or con) on the issue of copyright, well, there *are* people elsewhere who do make well-reasoned argument not based on ad hominem attacks but on the disastrous consequences of overly strong copyright laws.
Why don't you go read what they have to say and decide for yourself whether the copyright laws as they stand currently are worth defending?
If you want to make sure that you get all your arguments from a proven liberal (I don't know which side of the political spectrum the QuestionCopyright guys associate themselves with), you can always read what Lawrence Lessig has to say.
So if pirate bay loses does that mean I can no longer do my torrenting from google anymore? For example, I wanted to pirate mario kart (its been sold out for almost 3 weeks everywhere in my town), so I went to google and typed "mario kart filetype:torrent" with 346 results at here. Wonder what this means for services like google? I don't see how the logic used to filter .torrent files can be any different than filtering HTML content of "harmful or illegal" information. TPB should really consider creating a legal honeypot by hosting non torrent files and being a "regular" search engine.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
You may be right, but in the end the technology is rendering it all irrelevant. Simply put, the business model used by media companies overha the last century are untenable. It isn't the first time in history that new technology has rendered traditional methods obsolete, and it won't be the last. The most that can be won at this point is a brief a brief stay of execution.
Entertainment existed prior to copyrights and vast media conglomerates, and it will be here after they're all gone. Maybe the day of huge record companies and a few entertainers literally having money poured on them is over.
Governments are not doing these companies and their shareholders any favors by putting off the inevitable. The Japanese banned firearms in attempt to protect the traditional medieval model, and simply ended up having to import foreign experts a couple of centuries later to get the industry going again.
Whether this is all moral or immoral is absolutely meaningless. To be sure cannons are more destructive and impersonal than swords and longbows, but cannons won in the end.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Piracy may be grossly exagerated, but also is a real problem. The media companies may be stupid and behind the times but their concern is valid.
Yes, it is. So are the concerns of every other business out there. But as long as copyright law is as overwhelmingly partial as it is, I can't see many people shedding a tear -- except for the folks who're making a buck out of it (whether directly or by brib^W lobbying).
See, I completely agree with the two sides of the story you depict. There is wrong on both sides: definitely. It's just that where you take the media mega-corporations' side, most people won't, because people resent the injustices of tyrants far more than they resent the petty crimes of private individuals.
I guess that's what you get for buying tyrannical laws: even when you're in the right, everyone still hates you and wants to see you crash and burn. I do too -- even though I don't pirate anything except the occasional TV programme that I missed.
It's taken a loooooong time for the pendulum of public opinion to swing against copyright owners -- once upon a time it swung in their favour -- but it is swinging back. I for one hope it swings good and hard. If that were to happen, of course, we might be in for a century or two where the law is overwhelmingly in favour of pirates; in 2209 people might be having the same argument again, but with the sides swapped round. I don't say that that's a good thing. But it's no worse than the present situation.
Piracy may be grossly exaggerated, but also is a real problem.
I have yet to see any evidence of this. In fact, every serious study I've seen of the issue indicates that it's not only not a problem, but beneficial.
Without strong copyright law the GPL would be meaningless.
Apples and oranges. The GPL does not depend on the ability to get insanely high damages applied to broad classes of people, or to get ISPs to block network access, or any of the other crap the record labels have been trying to do.
What if someone contracted you to write code for them on a GPL project and then decides not to pay?
Not content with apples and oranges, now you decide to throw in a tire iron? That example doesn't even have anything to do with copyright; it would be a contract dispute.
They've gained too many rights. They've overstepped what they should be allowed. But that doesn't mean their rights should be thrown out either.
Doesn't it? In the first place, I question whether or not companies ought to have copyright ownership at all. Particularly in the case of music, I think the copyright should rest with the artist.
Second, I think the media industry is losing this battle so badly precisely BECAUSE they overstepped so far. They've extended copyright terms to such ridiculous limits that the average person has no idea that copyrights expire. This completely undermines the social contract that justifies copyright, and removes all moral force from the law.
People are generally honest, and generally willing to pay for good value. If copyright scope and terms were reduced to a reasonable level (which should, BTW, be shorter than the original 14 + 14 years, based on the theory underlying copyright law), then people would be able to see and understand the social contract, and there would be a much stronger moral imperative not to infringe.
In other words, if piracy actually does begin to hurt the media industry (a point upon which I remain skeptical; consider the example of Baen books, which publishes DRM-free and encourages copying -- and significantly boosts their sales by doing so), then it will be a simple case of reaping what they sowed.
I have no sympathy.
I do have sympathy for musicians, artists, authors, filmmakers, etc., you know, the people who actually create the entertainment we love. And I appreciate that they need to eat and that some forms of entertainment production are hugely expensive. But I'd rather focus on approaches that allow us to pay them. And I really have no doubt that such exist. As long as people want entertainment, and have money to spend on it, the people who create it will have a way to get paid.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
...then so are lawyers, cops, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, everyone who profits from fastfood sales, authors of shitty romances novels, the purveyors of most primetime (and otherwise) television, all mainstream recording industry employeeys, everyone in Hollywood, your mom, all commercial airlines, most elected government officials, and everyone who has ever downloaded a torrent, even if said downloader could not/would not have purchased the content in question had the torrent not been available. That's a lot of immorality. Any crimes here? Not many, and none of any seriousness worth concerning yourself with. Go watch more cable coverage of Caley and Haleigh, the pedophile religious leader of the moment, or debate the merits of OJ's cases, and quit confusing legality with morality.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
You're not going to get any traction here. I understand your feelings, but you've chosen your own hardship and it's my hope I can help you choose something else. We're going to talk about the love, the hate, and the life. Then we'll have the talk.
The love:
I really don't think the majority of /.ers have a problem with compensating artists. I sure don't. My kids got iPod Touch for Christmas, and they're allowed (and subsidised) to buy all the music they want. We're over $500 already, and in some places that's a lot of money. Those iPods hold a lot of money. Maybe that's why people are so eager to steal them. My family has only one rule: they're not allowed to buy a track with DRM, ever, for any reason. My family buys several thousand dollars worth of content a year*, and we're not a unique American family. We are perhaps odd in that we require that when we buy content, we get to own our local copy and use it however we like within reason.
The hate:
The RIAA, their international partners, their lobbyists and the lawmakers in their employ are harming us (everybody) in numerous and tangible ways. They are buying representation and buying law in ways that offend even the most passive citizen. They've bought the President of the United States for FSM's sake. The scope of their effort far exceeds the importance of their goods. Because they're solely focused on maximizing their profits, they're unaware of and uncaring of the harm their efforts are doing to our civil liberties, our political system and our longevity as a union. It is not in any American's best interest to fund this effort. Where possible I counter my family's contributions to their funds with small countering offsetting contributions and of course with our votes. That wasn't possible in the last election cycle because there were far more pressing issues, but we haven't forgotten this issue. The friends of the prosecution in this case are not the artists' friend. They exploit the vast majority of artists and give them a pittance. They're in the court to enforce their system of enslaving artists, and that's a bad thing.
The life:
There's no way the pirate bay is going to be convicted of anything here. The whole trial is a show to let the government of Sweden show the US they're trying to comply with the ridiculous demands of their lobbies. It's a theatre of the absurd not only because of the cultural dissonance between the RIAA and Sweden, but because the claims have no support in fact or law.
The talk:
More to the point: The RIAA and the MPAA are harming us. The harm is real. It's tangible. If you choose them as your hero, you'll find no friends anywhere except in the camp of your artist friends who have for now also bought into the idea that your exploiters are your representatives and that's a losing proposition. Their problem is that there's a lot of turnover in that group, for obvious reasons.
There's a middle ground here. You can choose different representation. If your art is marketable you can sell it to someone less offensive - someone who exploits artists less and aims to harm the rest of us less. You can do that. Do it and we'll prefer your art -- if it's good. The choice is yours. We can't force you to choose that, but we can make fun of you when you scream "Waaaaaaah! I'm retarded! Give money to somebody that isn't going to give it to me!" After all - that's fair.
* - Somebody's going to hate on me for this - starving children in Somalia and all that. Yeah, we give too - in amounts appropriate for our income both locally and globally, in both organized and personal ways, in amounts that meet the demands of our conscience, and encourage others to do the same. This isn't about that, so burn your torch somewhere else, ok? We're talking about something else.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is in Sweden, not the USA. The US constitution does not apply.
Not a sentence!
The ads on TPB are very annoying. First, there are the porn ads. Second, there are the talking ads. Finally, there are the deceptive ads, designed to trick people into clicking.
What would be useful, and poetic justice, would be for someone to set up a site that crawls TPB, and republishes all its torrents without all the sleazy ads.
Whoa, you think that the US has that much pull on the Swedish courts?
There are precedents.
The US has previosly interfered with the Swedish justice system, using political pressure on the Swedish Minister of Justice and other political officials.
Examples of such events are the Scientology trial against Zenon Panoussis when individual Congress members pressured Sweden and a second example is when Sweden's Minister of Justice after being pressured allowed CIA operatives to detain and deport Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery to Egypt, where they were imprisoned, beaten, and tortured.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Am I the only who's bothered by the ridiculous lopsidedness of the reporting? Torrentfreaks makes no bones about hiding its prejudices. However, they're not judge, nor jury, nor executioner, no matter how enthusiastically they pretend they were. For instance, in Exhibit A, the fact that half the charges were dropped seems to be a perfectly normal part of the process in Sweden, i.e. a step forward but hardly a victory, to hear it from other /.ers. Continuing, in Exhibit B, who cares if the "so-called computer expert" couldn't get his powerpoint presentation working? That doesn't mean squat; we've all had recalcitrant computers and projectors but that hardly means we're incompetent.
Does anyone remember the Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who swore that Iraq were winning victory after victory, and that the Americans were absolutely not in Bagdhad? All this at the very moment the American army was already in the city and closing in on them? To tanks, no intruders, only liars.
Feel free to replace "tanks" with "laws", "intruders" with "guilty defendants", and "liars" with "RIAA.
That being said, I fully support the Pirate Bay, the Pyratbyran, and their arguments. I hope that Sweden *does* have the courage to tell American businesses that just because they pass bankrupt laws on the backs of their own citizens doesn't mean they get to go overseas, like a certain rampaging giant gorilla of renown, and attack more sensible nations. I just want to feel that they're honestly winning the fight, instead of getting carried away by the fanboy'ing at Torrentfreaks.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Some day there will be a means for artists to make money.
But take a popular film such as Iron Man. That's going to cost $100 million dollars to make. Or LOTR. That's going to take $200 million to make. There isn't really any way around that.
Where are you going to find someone willing to front $200 million dollars except for a very large organization which can afford to LOSE $200 million dollars.
You may hear about films being made for only a couple million. Or the Half Life 2 TV show which "only cost $500". Sure... but I've worked on those kinds of projects before. They don't count all of the free labor and tools donated out of pocket. Let's take the HL2 TV Show.
Camera at least $500. Software to do the compositing at least $400. Any 3D Software employed at least $500. Crew of 5 working for 80 hours... that's $10,000. Post production? At least another 40 hours. Another $5-10k. I'm sure they also were able to avoid health care and taxes etc since nobody was actually payed.
If you added up the actual costs of even a 'no budget' fan film you're still looking at real costs on the order of at least $10,000. That doesn't work when the scope of your project grows beyond a few guys and some improvised dialog very well. Where is the business model for the 'Patron Supported' 10million dollar feature?
I don't believe piracy is a net negative impact on the industry. But I do know that the Pirate Bay is not the solution. The real solution is the impulse purchase. I know how I think. If I can get it conveniently for free I'll probably find an excuse not to pay it. If I really want something and it's more convenient and cheap (ala netflix on demand or Zune Pass) I'll go for that.
But I don't see any business model that can front the cash to shoot a $300 million dollar feature except for a gigantic corporation.
Protecting the gigantic corporation and protecting consumer rights are not mutually exclusive goals. (See imposed gas mileage laws vs Auto Industry.)
I also remember not more than a day ago the OUTRAGE!! that Facebook would withold the rights to use your photos however they wish. How is that anything other than zealous protection of our own copyrights? I like the idea that anything I create can't be used without my permission.
Laws aren't changed particularly swiftly. Before approval in parliament (riksdagen), a RFC is issued to concerned institutions and organizations. Of those, the Council on legislation (lagrådet) and the legal bar association (advokatsamfundet) generally weigh in on constitutionality of the proposed law.
Should an unconstitutional law be passed and someone be convicted of it, they can appeal to the highest judicial instance, the Supreme court of Sweden (Högsta Domstolen). It is, contrary to you claim, very real and existing; located in Bondeska Palatset on Stadsholmen in Stockholm.
That European Union you talk about dictated that downloading copyrighted material is legal and sharing it is legal up to sharing 2500 different copyrighted works.
Here be signatures
Just a reminder... you DIDN'T download it from TPB. You downloaded many pieces of it from your peers - TPB only provided an index to a torrent, which your client used to connect to trackers to find peers to download from. This is an important distinction to make, given the nature of this case! What's more, while TPB provides a nicely organised index for them, any regular search engine would find it as well, and would link to any number of other torrent indexes.
BTW, anyone know of any clients with ability to limit download/upload volume (not rate) on a per-peer basis?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is the USA and the US constitution does not apply. :/
Carl LunstrÃm is not really the kind of person that most people want to be associated with. He is well known for his connections to extreme right-wing groups. Apparently he donated money to Nationaldemokraterna, an extreme right-wing organization with connection to the Nazi movement. Several of there leaders have been convicted for various crimes. He was also a member of the racist organization Bevara Sverige Svenskt, BBS (Keep Sweden Swedish). There is more. Oh, and according to the prosecution he owns 40% of TPB.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
By the way, they are not guilty according to Swedish law. And what about USA law? Is it legal to create service like TPB in USA?
Why should the TPB give a rats ass about DMCA requests ? They're totally meaningless under the Swedish law they operate under.
How many times do YOU have to be told that the American DMCA laws do NOT apply in Sweden ?
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H L Mencken
I am not sure that meanes we shouldn't hope he wins :/
Is it legal to create service like TPB in USA?
From what I've read, on the other side of the Atlantic pond, their laws *DO* make that illegal :
What I understand in the DMCA, is that mere fact of pointing to illegal DRM-breaking countermeasures is it self illegal.
So not only would various versions of software packaged with their crack be illegal,
but the torrent tracker and torrent file itself, even if none of them hold the actual data, would be deemed illegal as together they point to place where the illegal data is (i.e.: other users in the P2P network).
This is a little bit weird as this could be interpreted in a way which makes Google illegal : even if Google doesn't host much data (except for cached pages* and picture thumbnails), one can type "crack" + {name of the soft to be cracked} and Google will bring up links pointing to websites which host the anti-DRM countermeasures.
Thankfully, here in Europe we have saner laws. Pointing itself isn't a crime. And anyway several jurisdictions even tolerate DRM-breaking softwares (Switzerland's law even explicitly tells that DRM-circumvention softwares aren't illegal when used in ways authorized by the copyright law).
*: There's bound to be some source code of some anti-DRM algorithm (like DeCSS) documented on some web page and saved somewhere in the Google cache. So in fact Google *is* holding illegal code, but that's not my current demonstration.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Hey, Lundström! Is that an umlaut over your name, or are those your tiny balls?
This post is LAW where prohibited by VOID. Prosecutors will be violated.
Where are you going to find someone willing to front $200 million dollars except for a very large organization which can afford to LOSE $200 million dollars.
1. Ever heard of the Sistine Chapel? Art has traditionally been paid for by wealthy donors.
2. You have swallowed the myth that piracy will somehow keep expensive art from happening. The fact is that no matter how many people pirate LOTR, it will still make huge profits. Internet piracy has been around for over a decade now and the media companies are still making money hand over fist.
The major record labels may be struggling, but their blaming piracy is bogus. The people who used to work for them are now their competetion, and the indies are eating their lunch. RIAA labels are obsolete; the price of producing an album has dropped from astronomical levels to the point any band who can afford musical instruments can afford to record and distribute.
I bought an Adam Sandler movie at Wal Mart yesterday for five dollars. There appeared to be hundreds of actors; there was background music, etc. Why would I pay twenty bucks for that new ACDC CD? RIAA music is vastly overpriced. There is no reason whatever why a CD should cost more than five dollars (which is actually the average price for indie CDs).
Then there is the ill will that the labels' evilness has caused, which has extended to an organized boycott that has lasted for over half a decade without the labels' no more acknowledging than they acknowledge the existance of their competetion.
Don't be fooled by these fools, join the struggle to eradicate them. Don't buy their CDs, don't rent their downloaded tunes, don't support them by hosting their files on morpheus. If you must have RIAA tunes, buy the CD from a used record store, or sample it from the radio.
The dangerous beast is most dangerous in its death throes. Help put the RIAA labels out of their misery - KILL THEM NOW.
Free Martian Whores!
What's sacrosanct about the theater?
If I can wear glasses and sit on my couch that overlay a 4k image with a larger picture than the theater and better sound in 5 years from a torrent why would I go to the theater?
The "Small Screen" aka the home is becoming more and more competitive with the theater. How many years before we have entire walls of our home as OLEDs?