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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.'"
Hmm say, out of curiosity, have you ever found the pot of gold? Because otherwise the comparison is pretty flimsy I would say...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Surprisingly, when the defendants hit the stand they didn't bash copyright or take a libertarian approach...
Why surprisingly? This happened in a court room. That kind of behavior in the court room will just upset the judge who will think you are a nutcase, and gets the case decided against you. Even if the judge completely agreed with you, being a copyright-bashing libertarian or whatever, he or she would apply the law as it is to judge.
The only sensible approach if you don't want to lose your case is to do exactly what the defendants did: Explain that they didn't do what they are accused of, or find reasons _within the existing law_, why they were allowed to do what they did.
Bleh, it's not surprising the defendants didn't bash copyrights. *Nobody* stands up in court and says "yes I did it, but this stuff shoulda been free in the first place".
From TFA:
"They all presented much the same points, the main ones being that the Pirate Bay site didn't hold any copyright films or music -- it merely acted as a search engine -- and that no copyrighted content passed through it anyway. The prosecution had failed to produce any uploaders or downloaders, and had not shown their actions were illegal where they happened to live."
which, of course, has been TPBs stance all along. Consistent, and simple. Why would TPB attack copyright law? T
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
So... an insanity plea, then? ;) :p
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
If the facts are against you, bang on the law. If the law is against you, bang on the facts. If both are against you, bang on the table.
Making an anti-copyright statement in court would be the equivalent of banging on the table, which Pirate Bay don't appear to need to do.
Here's the thing: a .torrent contains no data useful to anything but a BitTorrent client. It's just a pointer to the actual data. There's absolutely no proof that the actual content infringes anyone's copyrights.
Think of it this way. I make a sign that says BUY FULLY-AUTOMATIC ASSAULT WEAPONS HERE and install it on a gun shop's building. Fully-automatic assault weapons are illegal in my jursidiction. Do they arrest me, the sign maker?
No. They arrest the frickin' gun shop owner for selling illegal weapons.
What ThePirateBay.org does, at least in Sweden, is equivalent to what the sign maker did.
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... the difference being that while P2P has legitimate uses, guns have NO legitimate use, at least in my mind. They are designed for one purpose: to maim and to kill. I don't care whether the intended target is a criminal or not, I still believe that that is wrong. That's not to mention the fact that while most people might buy them for "legitimate" purposes, a large portion of those guns unfortunately end up being used to commit crimes or accidents anyway.
I agree. I usually "pirate" things that are unobtainable by any other means.
That is what the industry doesn't realize. First off - the party is over - the genie is out of the bottle. Also - stop pretending that every pirated copy is lost revenue.
The content producers/providers must provide easy, ubiquitous access to EVERYTHING, and new ways of gathering revenue (hulu.com is a great example). They can no longer treat their content like physical entities. That was a side-effect of the imprisonment of media to the physical distribution model.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
You, me, and everyone else are not guaranteed a living in *any* profession we choose. You have to earn a living. Additional legislation results in either welfare or socialism. (Let's just say I'm not a big fan of either.) If you want to be a musician, great, find a way to make it happen. If it's not economically sustainable on it's own, get a job to support yourself. You can still be a musician. However, you are not entitled to be a full-time musician just because you want to.
If musicians get lifetime royalties for their songs, then software engineers should get lifetime royalties for their code. Electrical engineers should get lifetime royalties for their schematics. Plumbers should get lifetime royalties for the toilets they installed in your house (proper plumbing is an art, after all.)
If this sounds extreme, consider the opposite side. A musician/artist/whoever has a backed-by-force-of-law monopoly on some work he did. Copyright is intended to benefit society by encouraging development of creative works (says so in the US Constitution, I can't say about it elsewhere.) So at some point, society is supposed to benefit. Exactly when does that happen if the originator of the work can camp on it for his entire lifetime plus 75 years? You and I have been swindled out of our part of the bargain - the work is supposed to drop into the community for use by others. Extension of copyright has stolen that from us, and yes, you have been deprived of access to something, so "stealing" is appropriately used.
"I don't think a right to privacy is a bad concept, I just think we should actually amend it into the Constitution and not decree that it exists....."
Well, you're just blatantly wrong.
The Constitution of the United States sets out and limits the powers of government. You cannot assume that if it isn't explicitly forbidden, then the Government has the right to do it.
Rather the opposite is true. If it isn't explicitly allowed, then the government does not have the right to do it.
Any basic reading of the text will show this, and studying the text more deeply will only confirm it.
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.
Let's say I were a 19 year old american and I visit Germany and enjoy a beer in a Bavarian beer garden. The girl at the next table speaks good english learned from her school year abroad in the USA and very well knows our federal drinking age limit. She witnesses me, a 19 year-old, violate US law by consuming a beer in Munich.
According to your logic, Dagmar should assist my home state police in arresting me for breaking US law.
Oh wait, I was in Germany where it is not against the law for 19 year olds to consume alcohol.
Do you see the analogy?
This is exactly the reason that some founders did not want a Bill of Rights, because people like you would come along and claim that our only rights under the Constitution are explicitly detailed within the Constitution. This isn't the intent of the Constitution or the Bill of rights. Some rights are assumed. Being a free society means assuming freedom not basing it on a few explicit rights detailed hundreds of years ago.
Time makes more converts than reason
Sounds alot like the reverse process of taking someone's money and then giving them investment advice...
Actually, it sounds a bit like the way the US Gov't works. Takes our money, then tells us to spend it all on big screen TVs.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
"And there again is where the liberal reading of the Constitution has failed us. The liberal reading of the Constitution is generally the reading that finds things within it that don't exist"
No sir. The fact is that governments (and indeed anyone with power) can read what ever they want in to the Constitution so long as it furthers their agenda. This is not a liberal reading of the Constitution. This is simply a reading that you don't agree with, and since you don't like "liberals" you can equate the two.
This is a logical fallacy.
Government of any stripe, whether liberal or democrat, or conservative or even neo-conservative like the Bush Administration, will always strain at the chains that bind it, in this case, the Constitution.
Sometimes those chains are stretched to breaking point, and the only difference isn't whether the government calls itself liberal or conservative. The only difference is whether the liberal members of the population, or the conservative members of the population, will agree with the change, or find it abhorrent. e.g. The Feds warrantless wiretapping OR The Feds regulating that states cannot make abortion illegal.
Okay. I'm in the United States and I am a U.S. citizen, subject to the USA PATRIOT Act. Did I just break the law?
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The DMCA is a US law. The Pirate Bay is under no obligation, neither moral nor legal, to respect DMCA takedown notices. The Pirate Bay is not subject to US law.
As for the copyright violation, the basis of the defense is that Pirate Bay is not responsible in the case that copyright violation is occurring. They aren't guilty themselves of the violation and they certainly don't need to assist any "law enforcement" in either supporting the DMCA or tracking down the actual culprits.
digital converter boxes != big screen TVs They may connect to each other, but they are not the same device.
I wasn't thinking of the converter box rebate at all. I was thinking more of this government line of "SPEND! SPEND! DON'T SAVE! WE NEED TO PUMP UP THE ECONOMY! THE SKY WILL FALL IF YOU HAVE ANY MONEY SAVED!" attitude.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci