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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."
Finally those pesky kids are in jail! We will have monstrous profit this year!!! No more STEALING of our property! ...
Next we will sue any blog that does spoilers or bad movie reviews as they can harm our buiseness, even more. Bad movie reviews can STEAL from us almost $78.9bn every year!! We must act quickly!!
The questions that come to mind:
1- Will Google be sued next (filetype:torrent anyone?)
2- Where can we donate to help pay the fine?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Anybody wanting to start a petition to the european parliement to revert the decision/(make linking legal) ?
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/parliament/public/staticDisplay.do?id=49
"One of the fundamental rights of European citizens: Any citizen, acting individually or jointly with others, may at any time exercise his right of petition to the European Parliament under Article 194 of the EC Treaty."
During the trial it was pretty clear the prosecution had no idea about what they were actually accusing the defendants of because they simply didn't understand the technology. Effectively throughout the trial they were unable to prove their case at all. What I'm interested to know is why - despite the prosecution failing to really prove their case, only to speculate on various things - this decision was reached.
In a way I kind of expected them to lose before the trial began because I presumed big media had spent the time and effort to find countless valid legal arguments, evidence and technicalities to get them on, but once the trial started it seemed much less likely as the prosecution was clueless and provided neither of these three things which is again why I'm baffled about the outcome. The decision doesn't appear to have been made based upon the court case at all hence why I'm interested to know if there is any further information from the court to explain how they came to this conclusion based on the court case.
I think I know what the answer probably is, that it really was about political pressure or bribery, but I'd like to give Swedish courts the benefit of the doubt first and see the reasoning behind the decision. Does the Swedish legal system make this sort of thing available?
Ok, everybody was dreaming thet they were going to be considered "innocent" and such.
But i personally see this outcome as a *big* win.
If the so colled four "bosses" of the Internet file sharing, accused by the industry of Billion dollars of losses and working as a team, can get away with first verdict of a year in jail and a fine of 750k $ each, this means that the court perfectly recognized the extreme differences between the Industry concept of damages due to not buying the records and the real thing ("Not every downloaded copy is a copy non sold")
From this verdict, we should think that a single individual, with a normal downloading activity, will be never hold responsible for any damage to the music/video industry.
From tfa, they were found guilty for "providing a website with ... sophisticated search functions, simple download and storage capabilities, and through the tracker linked to the website."
Brin and Page and the others at Google better not go to sweden.
You know, it's great that those people, who commit illegal acts because they are commercially driven, are always brought to justice, no matter what their country of origin is.
Of-course there is a small matter of agreeing what exactly it means for something to be 'illegal'. There also should be an exact description of what 'commercially driven' is, after all, if you download something instead of buying a paid version, you are commercially driven - you want to avoid paying money. There is also this small matter that a corporation based in one country, can force changes upon the law of that country, which seems to propagate itself almost magically to all these other countries, this seems odd.
It's great to see that politicians are not commercially driven at all, when they pass laws that somehow seem to benefit commercial entities much more than private individuals. Citizens they used to call them, now they are all consumers, not citizens. Term 'citizen' has an implication that you have obligations and rights at least within your country. Consumers have 'rights' but really it's mostly obligations, and it has nothing to do with countries. The obligations are to the commercial entities - large firms.
It is nice to see that those politicians, who are violating the trust of citizens to act in their best interest, those politicians that are really just fronts for commercial enterprise end up paying dearly for their transgressions. You know - jail sentences, fines...
It is nice to see that commercial enterprise and their leaders are always brought to justice when they are found in breach of any laws, especially when the breach is 'commercially driven'.
It is nice that governments don't start commercially driven wars and that if they do, they end up in jail.
It is nice that governments don't take bribes and don't change the rules, so that large commercial structures benefit and private citizens suffer. Like the US federal reserve that was created by government officials so that private commercial enterprises would benefit so much (the JP Morgan, the John D Rockefeller, who then can take cheap loans at lowered interest rates and which eventually lead to the current economic disaster after the monopolies built with these cheap money destroyed the small business and moved to the cheaper manufacturing lands), it is nice that Nelson Aldrich was found guilty of conspiring against the citizens of the US and was sent to jail for his role in devaluing the US currency.
It is nice that people responsible for profitable wars in Vietnam, African countries, Middle East, Asia, South and Central America, that all those people paid heavy prices for their crimes. .......
Wait, wait, are you telling me that all these things didn't really happen? So what is happening here then?
You can't handle the truth.
From Letters from a Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King, Jr:
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
"Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
"One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
Stay strong, guys.
They've just released a press conference:
http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009epicwinanyhow.php
You have to click on the "archive" button.
Y
The response to TPB here on Slashdot seems overwhelmingly positive, so maybe I've been missing something. I'm honestly curious. As a commercial software developer who works very hard and doesn't want to see my work made available for free, why would I approve of what TPB are doing? I mean, if people don't pay for the apps I make, then my kids don't eat (well, or I have to go find something else to do that I'd probably enjoy less).
I remember the first time I saw one of my apps made available on a pirate site. It was a horrible feeling. I wanted to find and beat the crap out of the guy who made it available.
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.
I mean, a lot of justifications I've seen for what they're doing are based around legal arguments (some would say loopholes). I'm actually more interested in the ethical side of things. Why is making it easy for people to steal ethical?
I'm not sure where I saw/heard/read this, but I seem to recall an article awhile back that was talking about Adobes perspective on the unlicensed use of Adobe Photoshop. In a nutshell the article said that even though they didn't approve of it, they didn't want to take all possible means to clamp down on it due to the fact that the majority of unlicensed copies were being used by amateurs who either didn't use the software that much, or would eventually learn the ins and outs and would get any company they worked for to buy a legitimate version for them for use at the office. Also, the article noted that most people who used Photoshop on a serious basis (e.g. artists) tended to get the money together to buy it as well even if they had an unlicensed version at some point. However, don't quote me on any of that as I can't recall where I saw it.
One thing that I do know for a fact though is that Adobe tends to have some pretty nice clauses in their license agreements that work well with the end users. For example, in the Lightroom 2.0 license there is a clause that allows you to have it installed on two different machines as long as you didn't use both copies at the same time. For a photographer this works out well because it means you can have it installed on your main workstation as well as a laptop that you use on site.
But I'm talking about the ethics of intentionally helping the person who made it available. I mean, TPB obviously knows the site facilitates the copying of copyrighted materials. It is called The PIRATE Bay.
It seems like that argument is ducking the ethical question.
Firstly a nitpick, copyright infringement is not stealing in a legal sense, "stealing" is theft, copyright infringement is just that.
There are lots of examples in law where providers of a service arent held responsible for how their customers us that service.
e.g. Car markers arent responsible for people speeding, but they still make cars with engines capable of doing twice the speed limit.
Telephone companies arent responsible for what is said over the phone, or images sent via fax, they have a legal exemption as a common carrier.
Computer hardware manufacturers arent help accountable for computers being used to perform copyright infingment.
An argument is that such services providers arent reasonably capable of policing their services, and i think thats a reasonable argument for most torrent sites, they just dont have the bandwidth and manpower to download, view and investigate the legality of the torrent.
TPB is in a more difficult situation as they refused to follow through and take down torrents even when they have been reasonably shown to be violating copyright. One issue is that they if they censor one torrent, then it can be claimed that they are acting as an editor, and as such can be help liable for all the torrents on the site.
Also, we should be a little bit object and consider that "everyone is doin it, so it cant be that bad".
International law is out of sync with societies views on copyright protection, something has to give, and it wont be the masses.
My own view is that as a society we should be encouraging people "to work", rather than "have worked", copyright protections encourages people to stop working and live of their past actions. Look at some of the old rock bands going around, they make money of "Performance" (the present) rather than "recordings" (the past)
I'm sorry. Where do we have a right to copy others' work? Although I download a lot of stuff, I don't try to delude myself into thinking what I'm doing is acceptable. If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay... it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
So it can all be solved by renaming it to "The Non-Pirate Bay"? Of course not.
The ethical question is quite easy. Long term copyright is not in the best interest of the people. Therefore it is unethical.
There's no need to judge TPB on a moral ground. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad".
It's just that your way of getting money is becoming obsolete. Just like candles manufacturers who fighted electricity, you are not relevant anymore in the current world.
Don't take me bad : you are right to do as much money as you can right now. But you must stay realistic : it won't stay like that forever :
1) A free software equivalent of your softwares might be created.
2) A big proprietary monopolistic vendor might do a software with the same features for half the price.
So, whatever you are doing, you know that it's a short term gain.
Now, let analyse your situation with your software being on TPB. Have you any evidence that it makes you loose money ?
If I told you that :
- 90% of people downloading your softwares would have never bought it anyway.
- 8% of those people weren't sure about your software and would have never bought it but after using the pirated version for more than one year, they choosed to buy an official version because "hey, it worth it".
- 2% of people wanted to buy the official version and stayed with the cracked one.
In this example, having your soft on TPB was a profit increase for you !
So please, just stop thinking with your guts and start using your brain. You have no evidence that file-sharing is bad for you. Not at all. Just an intuition driven by the music/software industry propganda.
Also, you know that it can't be stopped. It's an evolution. You can maybe make it a little slower (that's what RIAA is trying to do) but it will never be stopped. So, instead of crying, trying to slow evolution at all cost (conservative position), why not trying to take advantage of the future ?
http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?145-do-i-have-to-protect-my-content-with-drm-the-drm-equation
Ploum.net.
This is a pretty common outcome here in Asia. Everyone partakes in it from street sweepers through to politicians, it's going to be an uphill battle to eradicate from the home. That said, Indesign and Photoshop are applications that we were using on a regular basis for business. Pirated of course. We started to use it pretty seriously so we ended up buying a few copies of it. Not cheap either, we dropped about 2,500 USD on it all.
Now I was happy to do this, bring the business up to speed with software licenses, fully piracy free these days, but.... Adobe... Seriously, please don't ask your resellers to 'remind' me that piracy is illegal. I know that it is, we all do. And when you want copies of my drivers licenses and other government ID just to buy your stuff, I feel like you assumption is that I, the customer, am going to rip the CD out of the plastic and torrent it 15 minutes later. (I refused, they wanted the money so they waived the requirement) Did you not just see the receipt, over 2 grand my friend. I ain't giving that away to anyone, even have the serial numbers locked in the safe!
Take it to the extreme: if everyone in the world got hold of movies, music or software for free, why would artists and developers continue producing original works if they're receiving no reward for it?
You are assuming that "everyone in the world gets X for free" implies that "artists and developers receive no reward for it". That is a false assumption. Before there was even an idea of copyright, artists produced art. Busking has been around forever, with "pay what you think its worth" only the latest variation. Some artists found royal subsidies, others gave public performances while passing the hat Both of these systems exist today. Just looking at the music world, large corporations frequently sponsor concerts and art, while several musicians support themselves almost entirely from concerts. Jonathan Coulton has done both, going on concert tours and producing songs for Valve.
BTW, did you ever notice that on more than one occasion, Star Trek explicitly stated that televsion had died out sometime before the 24th Century? Many episodes instead featured people being entertained by live performances. I assume that 20th Century-style music publishing also died at the same time. I've always hoped that it was due to copyright reform, rendering it impossible for parasitic middlemen to extract value from the work of others.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Perhaps, but it ought to be possible to do all sorts of things, such as donating to legal fees or a political party, without being publically identified (and I would be very worried if the courts did allow the police to go fishing through such data - let alone record companies).
I will give you several arguments I have heard that go beyond "we should get free stuff":
1) Originally, copyrights were intended to inspire creative work (a public good) by protecting the creators rights to their produce and providing a financial incentive to create. However, in exchange for that protection, the idea was that the work would come into the public domain at the end of the copyright term - so the public was, in essence, buying the work and setting it free in exchange for those protections.
But then people who are not creators started buying up copyrights from people who create, and these purchasers used their money to push to have the laws changed. Previously, where a work could eventually join the public domain, the term had been extended (and extended) so that it seems like no work will ever enter the public domain again unless the copyright holder *explicitly* puts it into the public domain.
Suddenly the original equation - we protect you so you can create and make a profit and we then get the work after some time - has now changed to you hold a copyright and you can sue into oblivion anyone who infringes on it, and the work will never, ever become public because the copyright duration will keep on being increased.
2) DRM, which is fairly widely used, has become a tax on legitimate users of the software and does nothing to curtail illegal use. I paid for a copy of Spore (I know, I know, but I had hopes) and was completely unable to use it on my system because of the DRM. So I downloaded a pirated copy that, ironically, worked better than the one I had paid money for. A few years ago, I bought a CD, put it in my player and... it didn't work. Tried another player - no luck. A third - nope. I took the disc back, exchanged it, and the new one didn't work either. Turns out it was DRM that made it not workable on any of my players. Last CD I ever bought. Obviously, not everyone (not most, or even a real portion) of the people using sites like TPB own the stuff legitimately, but the general concept of sites like that being available as a way to address that because the publishers don't want to is not a bad one - just poorly implemented.
3) Times change, and businesses need to change with them. It used to be that it was somewhat difficult to find pirated software/movies/whatever. Then peer-to-peer came out and it became trivial to find anything you want. Rather than look for ways to make peer-to-peer work for them, most companies tried to squash p2p. Rather than accept that their business model needs to be updated, copyright holders (or their agencies) sought ways to throw the fear of god into people who dated to infringe on their IP, to the point of absurd lawsuits alleging hundreds of thousands in damages because some teenybopper downloaded Oops, I did it again... So, we have a situation where corporations are fighting to keep an outdated model, one that is not good for consumers (same high prices while production and distribution costs have gone down a lot, etc).
TPB is an example of how the marketplace will fight back against archaic ways of doing business. If a company offers the user a value-proposition that is better than TPB can offer, then the users will buy from the company. Right now, paying $50 for a game that doesn't work because the company is treating me like a criminal, that came with a meh manual and absolutely nothing special in the box, is not exactly tempting when I can go to a website and download something for free. Yet, oddly, I have absolutely no problem paying $20 for the client and $15 a month (and the occasional $50 for an expansion) for an MMO. I don't want to have to go to a store, buy a CD that is $20, has 3 songs I'll like on it and 10 that are horrifically overproduced shit, and have a CD that may not work on any of my players - but I have absolutely no problem dropping $100 on iTunes to mix and match songs from various artists that I can download immediately.
TPB and sites like it are forcing businesses to change their models to ones t
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
You are right: physical goods (cars) are not the same as non-physical goods (music). However, let's take your example to an extreme.
Non-physical goods have a marginal cost of zero after the first copy is sold. Therefore, in a world where lossless, free, unlimited copying takes place, in order to be guaranteed to at least recoup the cost of production, you must charge your entire cost of production for the first unit that you sell because after the first unit, there's a chance that no money is going to be flowing in - everyone can get a copy from someone else.
One solution to this is an escrowed release. People who want to donate whatever amount they feel like donating to an account, and when the balance in that account goes over a certain known amount, the work gets released for free to anybody. To be really slick, allow users to revoke their donation for free (minus perhaps a small, reasonable service charge that only covers the cost of the bank transfer in and out and only goes to the bank - that the seller makes no money off of). This allows people to pay what they want for an album or movie, ensures that you will break even, and leaves open the possibility for someone who likes the work to give you money even after the escrow period is over, allowing you to turn a profit. It also allows you to sell merchandise and tour in the remaining time.
Another solution to this is to do a hybrid escrowed release where you set the price equal to somewhere below the break-even point based on expected revenue from merchandising and concerts. This lowers the cost of the work to everyone, and your touring in support of the album can drum up interest and get people donating quickly.
Another solution is direct, mass patronage for artists with the stipulation that the works so produced belong to society and not to the patrons. This is much like the escrow model, but instead of paying for a single work, you're supporting many works.
Another solution is to eschew monetary rewards for non-physical work. The problem with this is that there's already money on the table and people that want to keep it flowing into their pockets, so this is not likely to work on an industry-wide basis. Those of us who write code like getting paid for the work we put in, no matter how non-physical.
But comparing the duplication of scare resources to the duplication of non-physical goods is disingenuous at best.
In the immortal words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and
anybody caught singin it without our permission,
will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't
give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing
to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted
to do."
A true American Hero.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Why don't we have a right to copy some other's work?
If I come over to your house and see a table that you bought, do I not have a right to measure it, go home, buy some wood and a saw and build my own? Am I infringing on the work of the carpenter who designed and built yours?
If I go to a restaurant and buy an entree, then go home and attempt to recreate it with my own supplies and utensils, have I infringed on the rights of the chef? What if I then publish the recipe I reverse engineered on my blog? Would the chef sue me for "making available" his creation? Would he win?
If I borrow a CD you purchased and after enjoying it, make a reasonably accurate copy with my own polycarbonate, dye, and laser engraver, how is that any different than the above examples?
Music "piracy" is about consumers competing with a distribution business model based on scarcity of physical goods. It used to be very expensive to duplicate CDs ($50k for a writer in 1989 IIRC) and at 600MB, they held more information than people were willing to burn on HDD storage. Times have changed. Now it's virtually free. But the labels still want you to pay the same costs.
Music piracy cannot steal from the artist the labor they spent on creating their art. There is no way I can recreate the live performance of my favorite band. I would still have to pay for the privilege of enjoying that. And no one would pay me for my facsimile cover performance of their music. Money can still be made in music, but distribution for all purposes is now virtually free. The labels need to adapt or die, but prefer to seek government protectionism by suing their customers.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Generally in a competitive market what the consumer is willing to pay for the consumer gets. Not what is forced down their throat and enforced by a bought and paid for government. I like spending my money on movies and music. I go to the movies regularly (inspite of having a pretty good home theater). But if instead of trying to woo me as a customer the only thing they do is a big middle finger at me...........
The problem is a failure of markets caused by the MAFIAA and their ilk and can easily be fixed by ignoring them imho
Actually, I have a fairly good idea. I manage some University servers and had to forecast requirements quite accurately for some very intensive, high-use services. And I can tell you that the server requirements for their setup are small money and that, at least at UK prices (I am presuming Sweden is comparable), you don't need US$65,000 per month to cover what they were doing either. Not by a long shot. A torrent file may be 14K. The amount of data for the transmitted peer lists will vary with number of peers, how long you share, and other factors, but it's going to be in the same sort of region or less normally. Let's just call it 30K in total for an average. At the cheaper end of bandwidth (before you get into discounts for big buying), you'd be looking at ballpark £0.80 per GB or US$1.20. So US$100 buys you enough to run over 2.5 million torrent files / peers. (I've allowed a generous 10% overhead on data transmitted to account for routing layers, dropped packets, etc.). The pirate bay were pulling in US$65,000 per month. Run 5x 500W servers in full usage without monitors on 24/7 for a month and at UK industrial cost electricity and you're looking at about £150 per month or about US$220. Now you have to add on other costs like cooling, etc. But we can do 250million peers for under US$14,000 per month. See? This is ballpark of course, how can we do anything else without actual figures and costs, but it gives you some idea what we're talking about. So don't just randomly say to people online that they don't have any idea when you don't bring anything even slightly resembling a fact to the discussion.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.