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Pirate Bay Trial Ends In Jail Sentences
myvirtualid writes "The Globe and Mail reports that the Pirate Bay defendants were each sentenced Friday to one year in jail. According to the article, 'Judge Tomas Norstrom told reporters that the court took into account that the site was "commercially driven" when it made the ruling. The defendants have denied any commercial motives behind the site.' The defendants said before the verdict that they would appeal if they were found guilty. 'Stay calm — Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theater for the media,' Mr. Sunde said Friday in a posting on social networking site Twitter."
Update: 04/17 12:16 GMT by T : Several updates, below.
Thanks to all the readers who have sent in various other links related to this news, including the dozens who noted
the BBC's version of the story. Reader a_n_d_e_r_s submits a link to the verdict itself (large PDF, in Swedish), and writes "The sentencing is not unexpected (max verdict is 2 years in prison) and the damages is about 1/3 of what the companies that has requested damages had requested. Notice that no punitive damages is applicable." Reader yendor writes, "More details are coming and The Pirate Bay will be holding a press conference at 15.00 CET.
HakanRoswallGoatse points out that besides the jail term imposed (and barring the results of planned appeals), "the four men will have to pay $3,6 million in compensation for lost sales to 17 media companies. Among them are: Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra Entertainment, and Activision."
HakanRoswallGoatse points out that besides the jail term imposed (and barring the results of planned appeals), "the four men will have to pay $3,6 million in compensation for lost sales to 17 media companies. Among them are: Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra Entertainment, and Activision."
Well it was pretty predictable. This is what judicial systems are made for! Putting people the state does not like in jail.
Are they getting a bit delusional? Calling it theatre after being sent to prison for a year doesn't sound like theatre it sounds like hard time and the $2.4m fine doesn't look too much like theatre.
Whether you agree or not with the judgement its very hard to describe imprisonment and multi-million dollar fines as theatre for the media. I worry that they've drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
but expected. A good question is - will this stop anyone from filesharing at all?
If you take the site down then your admitting you did something wrong. I don't know much about the case, but thats how i see it.
Search in google "filetype:torrent Wolverine" and see what it gets you.
From the article, the guys don't seem worried. Appeals are forthcoming.
So, let's say I run a website on which users could provide a link to copyrighted material, and then a user goes ahead and copies that material in a way that violates that copyright. Furthermore, I make it easy for users to search for those links or associated information describing them, and I make some money from the site by having advertisements on it. At that point I could be charged and face potential jail time?
Wow. Will there be any websites hosted in Sweden after this?
One could imagine a trial in New York, 90 years ago that would probably find a similar crew guilty of directing tourists to speakeasy clubs, i.e. assisting in the sale of liquor.
Prohibition was abolished 14 years later.
Not long now...
Yeah so we've known for some time that running a file sharing site for illegally redistributed content is bad news from a legal liability standpoint ... but I am still surprised by what kinds of activities in our modern age get you jail time.
Is the fundamental issue "loss of money"? Well, the executives of the big banks in the world -- men like Charles Prince (Citigroup), Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide - collapsed), Alan Schwartz (Bear Stearns - collapsed) -- have lost far more money. They have lost money for investors, customers, and more recently taxpayers and even your children and your children's children. The damage caused by the systems they were responsible for is far greater han any of these file sharing misdemeanors. This is like comparing an out of control leaf fire in someone's backyard to the carpet bombing of a city.
But what happens to investment bank executives who lost ridiculous sums (we're talking trillions) and ruined the lives of many? Probably nothing... hell, the previous Goldman Sachs CEO was put in charge of the US Treasury Department (Paulson) where he proceeded to redistribute public money to colleagues. Some may argue that men like Paulson, Greenspan, and Bernanke are committing acts of treason by taking money out of the national treasury and diverting it into the hands of the wealthiest elite, the top 1% of society.
But don't expect to see any of these men in jail any time soon. Because in this world, the people who commit the grandest acts of financial theft and destruction are rewarded with lavish salaries and pensions, while the jails are filled with pot smokers, shoplifters, and guys who run file sharing web sites.
So, what are all the users of TPB considering doing to support
the folks behind TPB, who have supported them, in some way, in
past?
I don't think it's enough to celebrate the continuation of TPB
while forgetting the hassle, that its makers & operators have
to go through, now that they've been taken to task for TBP.
What? Consider them just happy martyrs, as you go on using the
legacy they've left you (as if they were dead)?
Well...? :-/
2- Where can we donate to help pay the fine?
You really want to subsidize the recording and movie industries with your money?
No, we want to help these guys get the fine paid off. You do realize that not paying for "damages" is terms for being put back into prison, right? The property they "stole" was imaginary, but the money they have to pay has to be real.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
You miss the point.
It was a generally held belief (and may well still turn out to be so) that what Pirate Bay did was NOT illegal in their country. It's yet to be (convincingly) proved otherwise, because the "evidence" was sparse and technically-incorrect at best. It was that unsure that it took a court to decide it, even after police raids that couldn't find anything "illegal". And it has yet to be appealed against.
What you name a place has NOTHING to do with the law behind it. You can't be convicted based on what you called something, unless the name itself is somehow illegal.
And as for "hitting the supply chain", maybe the best analogy then would be to stop camera-recording and/or screener leaks rather than chase down people who downloaded it? In actual fact if you want to eliminate something then you have to take out ALL forms of contact with it - drug dealers, drug pushers, drug takers, etc. This is the equivalent of suing not just the site owners, but the people who leaked your DVD and the people downloading it. By extension of the intentions of this case, that would also imply suing anyone who ever links to those torrents, anywhere, and anyone who carries the links to those torrents (e.g. Google) - it's like arresting people because they had a discussion about drugs, or told someone not to go to a particularly drug-ridden part of town late at night - you're trying to convict people who had only incidental connection with the crime but have performed no criminal act.
Remember - it's still not established law that what the Pirate Bay did was illegal. That's not true until all Swedish court appeals are finished and no more are allowed to be brought (and even after that, there's the possibility of an EU appeal/intervention).
No the real bummer is that so many people like you think that they are not criminals. Last time I checked, its illegal to take something that is not yours and you didn't pay for.
You make a copy. You don't take something.
And it has been that way for thousands of years.
No, it isn't. You could copy the Mona Lisa until you're green in the face, no problem.
You fully well know what they are trying to accomplish with their site. Don't pretend like its something its not.
They are providing torrent files. Plain text files. On which no copyright lies, or at least nobody minds that they copy those.
It is for encouraging piracy plain and simple.
Piracy happens in the coastal waters of Somalia. What you mean is called "copyright infringement".
You said it yourself:
"I wanted to find and beat the crap out of the guy who made it available."
The guy who made it available != TPB
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Bullshit.
There is nothing Swedish about the companies pushing this case both through money and political pressure. This is very much a decision that has been forced upon the defendants through foreign commercial influence and as soon as foreign commercial influence has pushed it's influence we are equally within our rights to push our views too.
By showing our distaste and by acting against those foreign companies in boycotting their products in our own countries, by pressuring our governments to also stop catering to these companies there is still a lot we can do.
The court may be Swedish, the defendants may be Swedish, the site may even be Swedish, but the companies and groups pushing the prosecution as well as the result of the prosecution most certainly are not purely Swedish and it is against these that we can act.
I certainly feel free in redistributing many of the files that I have obtained from others who felt like sharing them in the first place. Fortunately, I haven't yet experienced any limitations to that freedom, at least from any government. I've been taught how to copy records, tapes, and software from a very early age, and have grown up in an environment where this was encouraged. It saddens me to hear about people who are jailed for such activity, as it goes against the values that I was raised on.
Perhaps drinking coffee isn't worth going to jail for. It's not like fighting for freedom or anything. What happens if it's outlawed tomorrow? Does that make it worth going to jail for. Is the fact that it's likely that it won't be outlawed due to the fact that a large number of people drink it? Maybe instead of using coffee as an example, I could try using tea from dandelion leaves. What if it was outlawed tomorrow? Outlawing that would be a lot less likely to cause the same sort of disruption. Would that be worth going to jail over? It's not like drinking it is like fighting for freedom or anything.
How many insignificant freedoms have to be whittled away until they break the skin and strike a nerve?
Sigh.
It wasn't that she was too tired. It wasn't even happenstance. She got on the bus with the intention of sitting in the "whites only" part of it and getting arrested. It was the fact that she didn't back down and appealed to a higher court that made it civil disobedience. Unfortunately the whole message of civil rights never moved beyond the racism issue. Civil rights isn't just about racism.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm looking for a well written and researched piece that can tell me why TPB and other such sites are good for society, not some crap "I just want stuff for free" argument.
Will, IMHO the arguments are pretty straightforward:
Perhaps the simplest way to make this clear is to consider that existing copyright law is hopelessly outdated and irrelevant to the digital age. Notice that we don't 'copyright' jokes. Why not? Well, people retell jokes, have been doing so for millenia, and nobody has even thought to 'tax' each retelling of a joke - it would be futile and silly. And yet the exact same thing has happened to digital media - people can share files very easily and are naturally motivated to do so. Preventing this - through DRM or the law - is tantamount to trying to change the natural order of things, like a comedian trying to charge people whenever they tell his joke. It's laughable. And yet we have just seen people sentenced to jail in a parallel situation.
Yes, TPB are also childish in how they do this, but at least they do it. So even older Slashdotters like myself have some fondness for TPB, even while at the same time we are somewhat embarrassed by their antics.
Copyright is what makes the GPL work, so please do NOT "end copyright now." Eliminate software patents, repeal the DMCA, shorten the LIFETIME of copyrights, but don't END them.
If there are no copyrights whatsoever, then people will have a much harder time getting the things that are BEING copied right now, as without the financial incentive, there will be much less interest in making things people WANT to copy.
If ABC can't control the merchandising of the show Lost -- like, if they were to produce it, and someone downloaded it and started selling DVD's of it at Target -- ABC wouldn't produce TV shows, and I happen to like Lost, thank you very much.
I hate DRM and the various media industries' attempt to limit our time and format shifting as much as the next guy, but ethos like "information wants to be free, man" just cheapens the argument for all of us.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Even as a recording musician, I must disagree. Promoting the creation of works for the public good is EXACTLY the intent of intellectual property law.
From the U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 8
:
So the logic is: we, the public, want people to create lots of stuff for us to enjoy. Therefore, we will give them an incentive. We will temporarily prevent others from profiting from their work.
The goal of the law is to promote the good of the public, not of the creator. All intellectual property law should be considered by this standard - "how will granting this protection benefit the public?" - not in terms of the "rights" of the creator.
For example, how long should copyright last? The term has been extended several times already. If that temporary monopoly becomes permanent, then the public's resources (for example, the courts) are no longer being used for public good, but for the good of private individuals and corporations.
I am not in favor of piracy. And I believe if you enjoy movies or music or art or literature, you should want to support their creation financially. But we should remember that copyright and patents exist to benefit the people, not the owners of those properties. Which is exactly why they should become public domain after a reasonable time - so the public can fully enjoy the work we have protected and nurtured via our taxpayer-funded legal system.
Why is a creative writing more important than actual inventions? Do you really think that your "Great American Novel" is more important than the Heart/Lung Machine or a cure for AIDS?
As an inventor, I can get a max of 20 years out of a patent, and it costs me close to 40K to do that. Copyright is currently set at your lifetime plus 70 years, for free. Why should an artists work be valued so much higher than an inventors? Let's not forget that as a scientist, I can't get any form of protection for my work - raw science is neither patentable nor copywriteable.
So, why exactly is your story or painting so important to the world that you can demand payment for it for the rest of your life - and the life of your children most likely - with no added effort or cost while scientists aren't allowed to demand any payment and inventors are limited to 20 years for which they have to pay substantial sums of money?
I have never heard a good answer to that one. If you can't answer it, then you might want to reconsider your position. If copyright was structured like patents you would see 90% of the material going to public domain within 10 years because it's not profitable to pay to keep the copyright viable. Because it's free as in beer, people hang on to the copyright because it might make them a nickel some day down the line.
I don't download music, but it annoys the fuck out of me when people like you prattle on about some mystical god given right to profit forever for writing some drivel while people that actually make significant contributions to society are either denied any protection or are forced to pay repeatedly for the right that usually ends just as the demand for it peaks.