Slashdot Mirror
A Short Summary Following the Pirate Bay Trial
Dan B. writes "The Guardian has a nice piece wrapping up the trial in Sweden for the co-defendants in the P2P trial-of-the-decade, that of The Pirate Bay. 'Today, the defense lawyers summed up. It was a short trial and not a particularly merry one, but it could have far-reaching effects.' Surprisingly, when the defendants hit the stand they didn't bash copyright or take a libertarian approach; it all came back to the tried and tested formula for criminal defense, 'I am not responsible.'"
I heard it was 4 judges and no jury. One presiding judge and 3 others who are laymen. The three will decide the outcome. In case of indecision, then the presiding judge will decide.
It's both a criminal and civil case all in one.
And as the Swedes like to mention over and over, this is not the US.
Also, the prosecution never mentioned any details about the specific persons who committed the original crime that the TPB is supposedly assisting. Without an original crime, you cannot assist it. This is what I'm interested in hearing about with respect to the decision.
Sweden does not use juries in trials (with one exception: freedom of press). The verdict is decided by a judge and three laymen (ie not necessarily legally schooled people). The laymen usually serve the same court in four years periods, but can be appointed over and over.
Not using a jury means, mostly, that you don't get the drama/rhetoric content from a US trial, since any experienced layman will quickly see through the drama/rhetoric.
Personally I have a major problem with a legal system that can deprive me of my liberty without the consent of the community. One more reason to be happy I was born in the United States I suppose.
What about these kids?
The US, Canadian, UK, and Australian constitutions (which may or may not exist for each; I know the UK has no formal "Constitution" but several varied entries within legislature) do not cover Sweden.
The right to "Trial by one's Peers" does not mean a jury. It can be anybody from your society, as long as it's more than one person who does not have a vested interest in the outcome. That's why we have the Magistracy in the UK. They handle 98% of all UK criminal cases; They never go to Crown court and sit in front of a Judge or jury.
Again, World + Dog != America.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It also makes any victory or defeat in this case entirely hollow. This case will not change what is legal in relation to copyright law, but merely what you get to weasel out of.
Duh. It's a courtroom, not the parliament. You don't make law there, you enforce it. Imagine if any random murder trial could legalize murder.
If you want to change law, you don't do it on the defentants' seat.
This is frankly not true in the United States. Jury Nullification, though obscure, is a very balancing and necessary part of trial by a jury of peers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Precendent can in Sweden only be set by the Supreme Court.
Libertarians are for Liberty. (cute how the names work out like that) Personal Liberty. What goes along with this idea is things like limits on the power and responsibilities of government. Super simplified - your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
Libertarian visions of government get more complicated, as all ideologies do when they meet reality. They range from ideological anarchists to a wing of the (US) conservative republicans to (US) liberal democrats.
Maybe it is easier to demarcate what they are not. Libertarians are not socialists. They are not Communists. They are not Theocrats (like US republican social conservatives). They are definitely not "Progressives", whatever that means. However, all of these groups have something that they can feel Libertarian about. Conservative Republicans like the small government, hands off ideas. Liberal democrats and Progressives like the social freedoms. They all hate the "let people do stuff that I don't like" part, but that is the foundation of liberty, so Libertarians are relegated to a weird minority (3%) party mostly centered around drug legalization in the minds of the public.
So, to the question at hand... the Libertarian position on copyright. I think you could start a pretty good fight by lobbing that hand grenade in a room full of Libertarians. Libertarians are definitely for property rights and personal property ownership, which would argue for a perpetual copyright - if you created it, you own it. Libertarians are also definitely for freedom of thought and freedom of ideas. Since the only things that can be copyrighted are fundamentally just expressions of ideas, you could never control, own or limit an idea, or therefore copyright a work.
So unfortunately no, you cannot look to Libertarian philosophy to give a concrete, iron-clad position on copyright. You'd have to balance competing interests, just as our current copyright laws attempt to do.
AFAIK the only political philosophy that would lay the matter to rest is communism. Everything belongs to the state, so everything is copyright to the state in perpetuity. Simple.
To help your google-fu:
"The Swedish Judicial System - a brief presentation".
http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c4/33/41/0feab306.pdf
You have to have committed a crime in the first place for jury nullification to take place. If you haven't actually broken the law there is nothing to change.
In some other countries (like mine) precedent only happens if five similar cases are ruled in the same way, with none ruled in the opposite way...
No sig for the moment.
The fact that a right to privacy isn't explicit in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, cannot be evidence prima facie that a right to privacy does not exist. It takes a particular type of right-wing nuttery to get to that assumption.
This is especially true since the Bill of Rights makes it explicit that the Bill of Rights is not meant to be an enumeration of your rights (9th), and that the powers not delegated by the Constitution or prohibited by it are reserved to either the States or the People (10th).
Drifting further off topic, I know...
"Libertarian" is a term used mostly in the USA for those views that Europe calls "liberal". This is because authoritarian/conservative pundits and politicians have used the term to mean what Europe calls "social democrat".
Libertarians value personal freedom above all else, but in the USA that has led to strange bedfellows. In their quest to win more freedom from society in the form of government, they have teamed up with authoritarians (often mislabelled conservatives) who follow the same goal, but with a different purpose: the authoritarians see government as a rival to their authority as owners or as church scions.
This was not always the case. Part of why liberal became a term for social democrats in the USA is because most social democrats see the government as a tool to ensure personal liberty. To them, government is the tool that keeps one person from infringing on another's liberty, though if overdone it can lead to a nanny mentality.
Oh, and note that social democrat is slightly different from socialist. The social democrat is middle of the road, believing in a mixture of capitalism and state-owned properties. A typical social democrat position is that the roads should be state property, but the trucking and bus companies should be privately owned.
As for what this has to do with the Pirate Bay case, Sweden is an example of a balanced social democrat state, and the laws that it operate under reflect this. I think the Pirate Bay operators will get off the hook because no matter the morals of what they do, they were careful to obey the letter of the law. They provided a map to where you could get [X], but did not actually provide [X] nor guarantee that you could really get [X] from where they told you it was. It is the internet equivalent of "If you want weed, Johnny over there says he has some." No effort was made to see if Johnny really did have weed. From a liberal (European sense) view, as long as they don't touch the contraband in any way, they aren't liable for what the giver and taker do. Both parties are responsible for their own actions.
On the copyright issue, a lot of US Libertarians are also huge fans of the Constitution (and strict interpretation of what it says to put strict limits on what the Feds can do) and think the Founders got it mostly right. The original 14+14 copyright (not strictly in the Constitution, but keeping with the spirit of what it says about "securing for a limited time") would be just fine with many Libertarians.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
AFAIK the only political philosophy that would lay the matter to rest is communism. Everything belongs to the state, so everything is copyright to the state in perpetuity. Simple.
Since we talk about communism in an abstract way as a "political philosophy" here, you're wrong. There's no state in communism: it is, by its classic definition (that of Marx) "classless and stateless", and the ownership is common by all people constituting the society, not by a separate state.
Of course, such a thing never existed in practice - but then again, neither did a truly libertarian state.