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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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!
Copyright and patents, in all its current forms, is a barrier to free trade. It claims that your hardware and physical stuff somehow has claim on it by someone else. hey also serve to segregate "Inside Country" from outside the country, as non-USA countries do not abide by US patent law.
---Why pirate stuff when you can support the artist by paying them for their work?
They already did the work. Why should be indebted to them after the fact? I dont pay the electrician for every time I turn on the lights. I dont pay the carpenters who made the framing in this house whenever I go inside. I dont pay the car companies whenever I drive to and fro. So, why should I pay for a download with a cost that approaches 0?
---What? You don't consider it to be good enough to pay for? Why are you wanting it then?
The cost is not reasonable to many people. If instead, the cost was $.10 per song, much more purchases would be made. DRM also makes these crippled music files very undesirable. Also, many songs are not online with a legal service, so convenience wise, Piratebay is the only option.
Copyright is one of the biggest monopoly abuses in this country, considering how it has been extended and perverted. It deserves to be ignored. The number of torrenters (on 'illegal torrents') have a mandate by sheer numbers.
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.
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
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.