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A Short Summary Following the Pirate Bay Trial

Posted by kdawson on from the all-over-but-the-sawdust dept.

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.'"

32 of 500 comments (clear)

  1. No swaggering... by gnasher719 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No swaggering... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Isn't this a criminal case? Do you not have the right to a jury trial in Sweden?

      I was wondering about this myself. I tried finding out a few weeks ago but apparently my Google-fu was weak that day.

      Either way, even in a jury system, I would hope the end result would be the same. "Yeah I did X, but X shouldn't be a crime" is a fine political statement, but obviously not a defense in a court of law, while X is still a crime by current law.

    2. Re:No swaggering... by Vorlath · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:No swaggering... by uffe_nordholm · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:No swaggering... by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not using a jury means, mostly, that you don't get the drama/rhetoric content from a US trial

      It also means that the state can deprive you of your liberty without the necessity of convincing your fellow citizens why that is a good idea. I much prefer the concept of the jury system.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    5. Re:No swaggering... by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You could also interpret it as admitting the guilt of their users.

      I don't see how they're in a position to admit someone else's guilt. Whether there is such a thing, this lawsuit does not cover that.

      This is a coward's defence.

      No, it's an innocent's defence, who's being charged with the actions of their users, because the accusers can't catch the users. What they did was technically legal, and they know it. They also know that this is the only thing that counts.

      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.

    6. Re:No swaggering... by Meneguzzi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Some years ago it also meant that a jury composed of racist white people could convict a non-white person of a crime without any solid evidence to that conclusion, and based entirely on irrational preconceptions about behaviour being associated with the levels of melanine in one's skin...

      --
      www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
    7. Re:No swaggering... by Tom · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Theoretically, maybe. In practice, the systems are not so much different, as juries are not "perfect" either, are often biased, easily convinced through rhetorics, not truth, and so on.

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    8. Re:No swaggering... by nosfucious · · Score: 5, Funny

      And when I look at the 12 bozo's they'll probably select as "my peers". I think I'll take judge alone thank you.

      Only people on juries are those too stupid to get out of jury duty (or actually want to do it ... as in do gooders anxious to lock you away).

      --
      Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
    9. Re:No swaggering... by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Some years ago it also meant that a jury composed of racist white people could convict a non-white person of a crime without any solid evidence to that conclusion, and based entirely on irrational preconceptions about behaviour being associated with the levels of melanine in one's skin...

      And that wouldn't have happened with a racist judge just as easily as it happened with a racist jury? I'd still rather have the jury, if for no other reason than the fact that it's (hopefully) harder to wind up with 12 racists sitting on a jury than one racist sitting on the bench......

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    10. Re:No swaggering... by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'd rather have justice carried out by qualified professionals without political agendas.

      Let me know when you find some ;)

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    11. Re:No swaggering... by matoh · · Score: 5, Informative

      Precendent can in Sweden only be set by the Supreme Court.

    12. Re:No swaggering... by Cytotoxic · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. "Surprisingly?" by headLITE · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

    1. Re:"Surprisingly?" by onion2k · · Score: 5, Funny

      I did.

      --: This post has been monitored by HM Prison Service Parkhurst IT Services :--

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    2. Re:"Surprisingly?" by cperciva · · Score: 5, Insightful

      *Nobody* stands up in court and says "yes I did it, but this stuff shoulda been free in the first place".

      Maybe not in exactly those words, but many important constitutional cases have been decided after the individuals charged said "I did X, but X shouldn't be illegal". In Loving v. Virginia, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Loving never denied being married -- rather, they argued that interracial marriage shouldn't have been illegal.

      --
      Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
    3. Re:"Surprisingly?" by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

      So did I, but I'm from the U.S.

      ### This post has been monitored by Central Intelligence Agency, Guantanamo Bay IT
      Services Division ###

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    4. Re:"Surprisingly?" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      ... I expect the Spanish Inquisition ...

      That is a clear demonstrable lie. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

  3. Re:rainbow gold by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hmm say, out of curiosity, have you ever found the pot of gold?

    I did, but the damn leprechaun advised me to invest it all into a diversified portfolio of AIG, Lehman Brothers, Circuit City and General Motors :(

    --
    I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
    We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  4. Of course by ratboy666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:rainbow gold by h4rm0ny · · Score: 5, Funny

    I did, but the damn leprechaun advised me to invest it all into a diversified portfolio of AIG, Lehman Brothers, Circuit City and General Motors :(

    I found a Gnome's pot of gold. Or thought I did. When I opened it up, it was just filled with underpants! WTF? >:/

    --

    Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
  6. Re:rainbow gold by Hinhule · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, you robbed the leprechaun and then asked him for investment advice?

  7. Failed Prosecution? by jomiolto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The really interesting thing about this trial is that the record companies seem not to have done their homework at all (although part of that could be bias from TorrentFreak, which seems to be the major English news source about this trial). They seem to have failed in pretty much every front: they failed to show any real statistics on the effects of file sharing or the amount of copyright infringing material on the Pirate Bay, their "evidence" of illegally downloading things from the Pirate Bay didn't hold water (because they could not show that the Pirate Bay tracker was actually used in their downloads), and they couldn't even show that what the Pirate Bay is doing is illegal in Sweden.

    I can't really understand why they failed so hard. They had time to do their homework and I'm sure that they are not lacking in funds or other resources either. They could have collected some actual statistics on the amount of copyright infringing torrents or they could have done much better research on downloading copyright infringing stuff through the Pirate Bay -- disable DHT and all the other trackers beside the Pirate Bay, and you can be sure that the Pirate Bay tracker is used for the download.

    Are the record companies really this inept at grasping the Internet (and hiring people that do understand it) or did they just think that they would win by default? Either one seems unlikely to me, but who knows?

    1. Re:Failed Prosecution? by KeX3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It is not due to TorrentFreak-bias, they were exactly that inept in swedish as well.

      Three years of investigation, and they understand less about bittorrent than 10 minutes on wikipedia teaches you.

      They had no statistics, no _actual_ evidence (messed up downloads, screenshots of cut urls to torrents, vague and repeated accusations of child pronography, a few random looks at top 100-lists with nothing to back it except "i looked at it, you should trust me", ridiculous claims "99% of the files on pirate bay are copyright protected" and "100% of the people downloading from pirate bay would have bought the album if tpb wasn't there"), the witnesses they called were all media-moguls with absolutely no grasp of internet or technology, and generally a case built on "we sell less CDs, therefore the pirate bay is to blame" instead of realizing that "people don't want CDs anymore, that's why the sales are declining".

      Add to this the COMPLETE inability to understand the "cluster mentality" that the internet has brought to a more visible level, where there are no leaders, no decision-makers, no controlling people. People do what needs to be done, and that's the end of that. They spent half the trial trying to pinpoint someone as "the leader", something that in the case of TPB simply doesn't exist. There is a core group, but what makes them more important than the people outside that is simply server-access. Remove that from the equation and no matter who you are, you can do things without asking for permission.

      Not to mention that after these 3 years, half of the charge is dropped during the 2nd day because they completely misunderstood the nature of bittorrent, and HOW the file-sharing actually happened.

      "Botched", is the word that comes to mind.

      But I think this is because of who's behind them. The media-companies, who have never had any problems going forward brute force, waving money and ludicrous demands for more money, who are used to the other party bowing their heads and going "yes massa". When actually faced with _opposition_, their lack of preparation and knowledge shines through like the headlights of an 18-wheeler at 2 am (see, a car-analogy).

      And that's the end of this rant.

    2. Re:Failed Prosecution? by KeX3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Oh, and I completely forgot:

      Spending most of the time trying to discredit the personal and political opinions of the prosecuted and the witnesses they called, instead of trying to prove that crimes had been committed.

  8. Re:It's truly not black and white by h4rm0ny · · Score: 5, Insightful

    * The entire Friends series. After concluding it's worth it I ended up buying the DVD's.
    * Ditto with Sex and the City.

    So... an insanity plea, then? ;) :p

    --

    Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
  9. As the old adage has it . . . by Varitek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:As the old adage has it . . . by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Funny

      ... and if all of those are against you, bang a juror. *ducks*

      --
      I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  10. The Real Question by spykemail · · Score: 5, Funny

    The real question is: how many of the judges download regularly from the Pirate Bay? My guess is at least one...

    --
    Haiku for you!
  11. Entitlement Mentality, again by Migraineman · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Here again, we see the Entitlement Mentality that's pervasive in the Big-Music industry:

    In its report, Billboard quotes Kjell-Ã...ke Hamrén, chairman of SMFF, the Swedish Music Publishers Association:

    "Without compensation the creators' livelihood is unsustainable. It is therefore of utmost importance that licensing schemes and new legal services can emerge in the digital environment, while at the same time legislation says firmly no to grand scale businesses that are built on copyright infringement."

    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.

  12. Re:Activist Judges? by VShael · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  13. Re:More importantly, what does cliffski have to sa by Renegade88 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?