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Pirate Bay Retrial Denied, Judge Declared Unbiased
bonch writes "A Swedish court has ruled that the judge in the PirateBay trial is unbiased and there will be no retrial. Stockholm District Court defended the judge's membership in copyright organizations as a necessity to 'keep up with developments in the field' and that merely endorsing the idea of copyright law was not grounds for a mistrial. The defendants must now rely on the appeal process, while one defendant has written on his Twitter account that the PirateBay will also be suing Sweden for human rights violations."
Everyone is quoting this wrong. The only part denied was the one based off the bias. I'm not sure how swedish law works but I'd imagine there are plenty of other ways for this be declared a mistrial. Public uproar will be a part of that too.
Also, they still have the appeal. So if they are denied appeal or judges make a bad call off the appeal it will make a serious uproar in the country.
Any guesses how long it will take before the appeal starts/decisions are made/etc?
Just in case someone jumps to conclusions...
This just means there will be no re-trial, but the Pirate Bay still has an appeal, it doesn't mean they have to pay to fine or go to jail yet. That's still far away.
Of course they'll say he was unbiased. If he was biased in this case they'll have to review ALL the previous cases to make sure that he wasn't influenced for those.It was the only call they could make.
Now I might not agree with their decision but I expect they also know it has a good chance of going forward at appeal and so therefore do not need to address this now.
Boo! And not, like, some kinda "scary" boo! This shit's a boo with NEGATIVE connotations!
Human rights violations? WTF. I think the judge is obviously biased and I disagree with the decision, but what human rights are being violated? What a bunch of self righteous pussies we are becoming. Read some history.
They win, it adds fuel to the fire and gets the followers bolstered.
They lose, someone fights to fill the void (because there is money to be made) and people come up with even new technology to avoid such scenarios.
Legislators need to come up with an alternate approach to this perceived problem. Similar to how legalization (decriminalization) and regulation of illegal drugs would stop drug wars, some other strategy in the "war on piracy" could bring money to content creators while not making an arms race out of sharing information.
Please post. thanks.
"Judge Bauregard P Burnside today justified his membership in the KKK saying, 'I have to keep up on current civil rights developments.'"
Hey, that's what I say when I'm caught watching porn on the internet when I should be working! Get your own lame excuse, or I'll sue you for infringement.
...sees this summary and thinks ... DUP?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
that that court is biased too.
So someone needs to investigate on them.
Until you reach the very top of the shitpile.
Which most likely is sitting invisibly above the government. (I mean lobby groups.)
I say: Vote for the Pirate Party!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
We might be reading more into this membership thing than is needed. One justification for membership put forward was "in order to keep current on the issues." If this membership is part of ongoing professional education, then I am not so sure it is inappropriate. However, it would be a lot more telling to learn what percentage of judges eligible to hear this case is a member of such an organization? If it is more than 50%, then I have to lean in favor of the justification. If it is less, then I certainly have my doubts... and if it is 10% or less, I smell a rat.
One rarely sees such droll humor here on Slashdot.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
This is what you get for buying Ikea.
Note that the judge B (Anders Eka) deciding if judge A was biased was himself a member of a pro-copyright group. The whole thing is disgusting.
http://blog.brokep.com/2009/05/20/google-is-your-friend/
Fellow pirates,
I implore you to continue your campaign on Slashdot to make me feel less guilty. I know that not paying someone for their work is wrong, but if Slashdot posts enough articles bashing the RIAA/MPAA/copyright law/whatever, it's easier for me to accept what I'm doing emotionally by visualizing someone else as the bad guy. Once on the forefront of relevant IT news, Slashdot is now a lame repository of mainstream pseudoscience links and pro-piracy articles to appease a dwindling readership. I am overjoyed.
Even though the open source community is about giving back as much as it is taking, I'm just going to take. I'm a human leech with self-serving beliefs and an inability to empathize with content creators who are trying to make a living.
I don't believe John Carmack should be paid for his work. I'm going to sit on my ass while he spends years coding the next advanced 3D engine from id Software. When their game comes out, I'm going to pirate it without giving a second thought about paying John Carmack for his work. I'm just so used to pirating things now that I take it for granted. If anyone mentions John Carmack to make me feel guilty, I'll look for Slashdot articles that bolster my viewpoint, such as this one, amusingly posted in the Your Rights Online section even though none of my rights are being violated.
According to that study, it's okay to not pay people for their work because there's some vague hope that they'll make up the difference in income through "concerts and speaking tours." Artists are now forced to take time out of doing what they want to do. John Carmack must stop programming in order to make money from programming. It's genius. The study does exactly what I need it to--make me feel less guilty when I pirate. We've managed to stretch the truth so far that we're actually telling ourselves that we're helping artists by not paying them for their work. Excellent job.
I look forward to Slashdot telling me everyday who the bad guys are. Even though Slashdot has sued websites in the past for copyright infringement, and they've pretended to care about plagiarism, we're supposed to go along with Slashdot's anti-copyright agenda. I'm okay with that hypocrisy because it serves me. It makes me feel less guilty when I pirate something. Remember, I'm not the bad guy--the RIAA/MPAA/whatever is. That makes it okay for me to not pay people for their work.
EULAs and copyright licenses are wrong, yet the GPL is good. Piracy isn't theft, yet GPL violations are referred to as "stolen GPL code." I accept all of these double-standards because it serves me. I pretend not to notice when someone points out that the GPL relies on copyright law, and if I want to get rid of copyright, my beloved open source code will no longer be protected by the GPL. I don't care, because I'm too busy concerning myself with what I want for free, not about the consequences. I want to get rid of copyrights because I've been told that copyrights are the bad guy, and they are an obstacle to my rampant piracy.
Fellow pirates, let us continue our selfish leeching. Let us paint others as the bad guys to absolve us of our emotional guilt. Our goal is to convince people that piracy is something the good guys are doing in a fight with the evil corporations. Making money is wrong, even though Slashdot displays ads, and it cost me money to buy the computer I'm using to pirate stuff.
Yours truly,
A fellow Slashbot
I don't think they should go to jail or even wear a massive fine, they aren't violent criminals and it's debatable that they have even cost anyone money. but what they were doing under swedish law was illegal ffs.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The FSF page specifically says that the GPL assures the copyright of software and protects the rights of the content creator. So why are Slashdotters constantly opposed to copyright and in favor of piracy except in GPL violation articles? Does your opposition to copyright mean I can take your GPL code and sell it as a closed-source program?
I'm confused, because the GPL is a copyright license. The FSF says right on its website that the GPL protects the rights of the author by assuring copyright over the software. Why do Slashdotters believe the rights of the content creators whose material is pirated on PirateBay don't matter, but the rights of GPL authors do? If copyright law is wrong, then I can do whatever I want with your precious GPL code and completely ignore the usage restrictions described in the copyright license.
Seriously, do Slashdotters realize how self-serving and hypocritical they come off when they rant about the "MAFIAA" (the latest goofy Slashdot meme) while defending the GPL? The GPL is a copyright license with usage restrictions, the very things everybody is suddenly opposed to when the copyright is applied to something else!
Conclusion--if copyright is wrong, then so is the GPL.
"Sufferin' succotash."
To claim that this caused no bias is a disgrace on the Swedish judicial system. It's hogwash. The Litmus Test here is: If there was no bias involved then this should have been declared in the first minute of trial and allowed for any objections at that time. To hide it through the entire trial and as best they could afterwards until the defendants were able to dig it up shrieks of the fix being in and the trial being nothing but show. I'm left to wonder how the prosecution actually managed to keep straight faces throughout all of this since they surely had to have known.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sorry, nobody talked about us for a while.
Carry on.
A false dichotomy is an old debating trick where one party says, "well, you oppose X, and therefore you must be for Y!" It's called "false" because the world really doesn't work that way. There are many different options.
You are employing a false dichotomy here. Opposition to the current copyright regime is not synonymous with the abolition of copyright. Many of us, instead, feel that copyright needs to be reformed, not abolished:
These changes will maintain the spirit and essential utility of copyright law while curbing the abuses of the past half-century. Reform will restore copyright to the status of a fair social contract that rewards creativity without smothering it.
I don't normally have any reason to think about the Swedish justice system, but this makes it look like a joke to me. How many people in nations other than Sweden have never followed a Swedish trial before now, and this is their first exposure. Convicting Swedish citizens for the benefit of powerful foreign corporations for "assisting in the infringement of copyrights", where the judge is a member of multiple pro-copyright organizations? Whether it's fair or not, I think that this is a black eye for the Swedish legal system in terms of international perception.
Not much hypocrisy if you can really grok the genesis of the GPL. There's a reason the GPL is also known as the copy*left*. Perhaps go back and do some more research, this has been explained quite a few times here already over the years.
Here is an easy start on it copyleft
Basically, it is a very good attempt at trying to solve a lot of the problems with copyright as it has been transformed into the abomination that we have today. It's a well thought out and pretty fair compromise which seeks to give the best possible set of rules to a situation where the rules have been skewed in the direction of "perpetuity". Copyright as originally proposed was for a limited time. Taking "limited" to mean "any length of years we can bribe through congress, then some", the law itself has been compromised so that the public good-to be able to use the stuff in some sane time period, to have it enter public domain-was lost. People alive today will never get to be able to use copyrighted works as originally intended if something is copyrighted today. It has been placed beyond human life spans! That's NUTS and goes completely against the spirit of the original thinking, and even then it was *very* generous in terms of years..but NOOO, that wasn't good enough! Every time major works get close to entering public domain, wham, another huge extension and more restrictions. The GPL is a very rational way to work around those restrictions and to insure the "public good" part, so that things copyrighted under that license can actually be USED by the people and not ABUSED by some jerkoff corporation or cartel.
Copyright is an 100% human political construct that is GRANTED to you by collective society, and originally for only such a time as you could try and make something from it, then it was supposed to be passed on to the public at large to benefit. We the people could make your copyright terms be three days, get it? Or zero. But..it got pushed to life plus enough for the lazy ass kids to still make loot from it, plus some corporation made up of paper work shufflers who never had a creative thought in their life. The public today gets bupkis!
Now..you won't be able to ever "legally" be able to take those ideas and see what else could be done from them..you'll be LONG GONE before things copyrighted today fall out of copyright. That's why copyright is broken and things like the GPL-copyleft- are necessary to try and work around those crazy law extensions that some big cartels-and I mean cartels in the fullest unethical business sense-pushed for. It's a well meaning compromise and seems to be working so far.
For the other, it is called a combination of civil disobedience, also a normal human response to really stupid laws (see also prohibition, etc) and a reaction to *blatant cartel price gouging* in the face of digital copies of works costing at most a small fraction of a penny to reproduce, but because of cartel pricing, are being forcefully restricted to many dollars per "lawful copy". 100,000% markup is blatant highway robbery pure insanity price gouging, and is only "law" and "business practice" today because these cartels bribed off congress enough to get this stuff passed and to keep the feds off their backs. It's a criminal enterprise at this point, and people just don't care, they just DON'T give shit one about being less than upfront with obvious crooks. That's just human nature, now you know why there is this apparent dichotomy.
When content creators are a little more righteous and fair, they get treated better, when they are obvious crooks and scamsters like what is represented by the new term MAFIAA, people just don't care, because they know they are dealing with crooks anyway, so..meh. Just meh.
When the government and "law" starts busting these cartels for price manipulation and collusion (which they SHOULD and NEVER do, those laws are on the books as well, and are being blatantly ignored because of obvious
Where ARE my mod points lately?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Don't most modern governments have something in their constitutions or charters which prohibit making laws with the sole purpose being just to prosecute someone?
Isn't that what Swedish parliament did? Didn't they specifically pass a law to prosecute TPB?
If not, then the whole process is a sham.
They're using their grammar skills there.
That is a perfect summation of what I believe needs to be done with copyright. I find it appalling that back when the world was large, meaning it took a long time for works to move form one place to another, a 14 year copyright was seen as fine, but now that the world is small, meaning we can send data around in world in seconds, we need life + 70 years. Copyright should be brief so that it serves the purpose of "promoting the progres of useful arts and sciences," not infinite so that companies can sit on things.
These courts are crazy. There is only one question they should be asking themselves: WWJHTSD? What would judge Harry T. Stone do in this situation?
Maybe more people would take them seriously if they presented themselves in a more credible manner.
Obviously, they believe that file sharing is not morally wrong, and should not be illegal. And yet, selecting the name "Pirate Party" makes them appear to be saying "We know what we are doing is wrong and we are proud of it! Ha ha! Look what we can get away with!"
If they picked a more respectable name, like maybe "Electronic Freedom Party" or "Fair Use Party" or "Abundant Goods Party" or whatever, maybe people would take them a bit more seriously.
If they wind up exhausting all options and sent to rot in jail....they may have a corrupt system to blame, but they will have to shoulder some of that blame themselves just for their immature behavior.
He also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws.
You can simplify it by calling it the ivory tower syndrome. As a system gets older, there tends to be widening gaps between those in power and those rules by said powers.
In itself, this is normal. If I am a boss of a small company, I can keep in contact with each of my employees. I can go and ASK what kind of a refreshment they want AND probably have the capacity to supply it. Something intresting seems to happen, IF people in a small group are asked what they want, they limit themselves to ask for things that are reasonable with that group. Either that or magically every small company doesn't have someone with outlandish desires. But as the company gets bigger, the request for type of refreshments becomes wider. No longer just coffee, thee and water but perhaps cola as well. Then different varieties of tea. Soda. Decaf. Herbal teas. Fairtrade coffee. Snacks. Health food.
At a given point, a line has to be drawn as the cost of supplying all those refreshements becomes larger and larger per person served. Four builders in a car can get a drink from their boss at the gas station. A bus load woild already be a problem. A large office, impossible. Just the process of the boss noting it all down would require a major piece of organisation.
And so systems are put in place, layers of organisation that make the day to day running possible but also seperate people.
You see this clearly in europe with the emergence of protest parties and the reaction of the established parties to it. In the netherlands it is almost literally "We think we are doing alright, why doesn't the voter accept that we are doing alright when we tell him we are doing alright". Because the VOTER sees something different. Wether that is immigrants or social security or healthcare it don't matter.
The british decleration scandal is a large part of this. Not the scandal itself, but what it tells us about those in powers and those who are not. What is the difference between the average politician, judge, journalist (NEWS), media-person(artists) and the voter? The first all got a HIGH paying job. They are the ones who traditionally make public opinion but we got the old Yes Minister quote "The problem with public healthcare, public schoold and public transport is that those who make the decisions go to private hospitals, send their kids to private schools and are driven in chauffeur driven cars" in action. How can a news anchor who makes a million a year relate to being unemployed? It is hard enough to do with a normal job, for the superrich it is not possible.
In the netherlands, the SOCIALIST tv broadcaster VARA pays some of its top talent HALF a million euros. Yeah, they are going to be real socialists, capable of keeping in touch with the common man.
In the netherlands their is currently building resentment against the legal system. Not so much the police but the judges who keep handing out incredibly weak sentences. The judges don't live anywhere near crime affected areas, they work in buildings with armed guards outside and associate in circles of friends that are completly white. They make a salary that makes it easy for them to buy CD's or iTune with never having to wonder why the prices for media have never come down despite ever shrinking production costs.
The whole process of seperation is incredibly subtle and takes decades. The owner of a newspaper becomes richer, he will promote those editors that share his view of the world, editors that want to be promoted will make sure they share his view and hire only writers that share that view. And never to directly,it is not as if the job interview goes "Do you vote VVD" or something like that but gradually the effect is the same.
It shows clearly in that a lot of news media seem to reflect so poorly what is happening on the streets. Hell, Iran can be explained. The powers that be just did what they always did, the one they decided should win was made to win. But years of isolation from the masses made it a complete suprise that the masses had moved
The claim you make is that he uses his membership to keep informed. But this club is informing him of only ONE side of the argument. Where is his membership of consumer organisations? His membership of the Pirate Party? His contribution to the swedish EFF (if such a thing exists?).
A politician visits a moskee to keep informed about developments in society.
A: this shows he is a caring involved person.
B: this shows he is a muslim lover who screws over the majority for a minorty.
A or B can be proven by simply asking this. How much time does he spend with other religions?
Dutch radio station gets subsidie for broadcasting ethnic music and reporting on issues that affect minorities. oddly enough the amount of jewish music is zero. Vietnamese music? Zero. Chinese? Zero. Indonesian? Zero. Oddly enough, all the music is either related to islamic or black immigrants. Everyone else is ignored. Is it therefor a station deserving of its claim to serve all minorities?
Being unbiased means you don't listen to just ONE side of an argument while ignoring the other side. This pro-copyright group is NOT going to give him unbiased info. It would be like me listening to Geert Wilders to get the true info on immigration issues. OR for that matter, to ignore Geert Wilders and only listen to the above mentioned radio station. Biase is biase no matter what side you choose to favor.
Ask yourself this, what would the case have been if the judge was found to be a member of the Pirate Party? Do you think the copyright holders wouldn't have complained then?
I just lost my faith to Swedish court system. Even though Piratebay is sorta spreading illegal material through their trackers, the hunt of them has been lead by copyright lobby's and firms up to a point where only winning is the goal no matter what means (bribery) there are used.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about this crap.
They are guilty. Trying to weasel out based on the fact that the judge wasn't completely blind to the fact that they were guilty is horse shit.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
There is something rotten in the state of Sweden...
Don't be crazy anymore!
"merely endorsing the idea of copyright law was not grounds for a mistrial. "
That's all right, it isn't merely endorsing the idea of copyright law, it's being friends with the prosecuting solicitor, friends of the prosecution and making up a law that doesn't exist.
So three other reasons that don't fall under that and so it can be claimed a mistrial.
And, since the telecoms infrastructure was involved too, this is the government facilitating. The closing of THIS loophole means that the ISP's and backbone carriers all the way up to the government are ALSO guilty.
We shall expect to see Sweden prosecuting itself for 40M KOR any time now.
and if that's true and it's NOT held by a corporation, there is no copyright on it.
So your OP is correct.
Unless TPB get lots of money and bribe politicians to become a fully paid up corporation.
everything today is derivative...it is called evolution.
as for the privilege of denying others...that is called oppression.
and personal file sharing...well, that is just stealing shit.
He may have been unbiased, but he definitely was computer illiterate! How could a judge make a ruling of great importance, without knowing the first thing about torrent downloads, he even admitted it was beyond his comprehension, but was able to make a conclusion based on the arguments presented before him. I say BS, you need to know when someone is throwing you a line with a hook on it, that way you can see the type of card playing he does, let's you know how to interpret further accusations/defense they might have. If someone lies to you about something (like a download being local peer to peer and not through a server) and says that piratebay is responsible for serving the content....then it would mean you know this person twists things, and therefor would be very skeptical of further opinions or conclusions from that person, no?
Why not set up a charity to buy copyrights from artists and then distribute the works for free to all of society?
Not to beat a dead horse, but since Micheal Jackson owes like $400,000,000, would it be possible to raise those funds to purchase the copyrights to his works and then give it away to the public? Couldn't that be an alternative means to fighting copyrights that are too long?
We can agree on two things here.
You're sick and tired.
-FL
The closer you are to an ocean it seems, the less conservative the population. Newfoundland, for instance, is sexually mature and very relaxed and open. The prairies edge closer to the "burning gays in your front yard" end of the scale.
Interestingly, you might do better in the middle of the country. The more tightly wound people are, the more likely they are to explode and jump into odd experiments with complete strangers willy nilly. Doesn't sound very nice, though, but that's just a personal opinion.
Of course, that's a very wide brush I'm painting with. But I just had this conversation last night, so it was on my mind when I read your question just now.
-FL
You were simply never breast fed as a child.
The universe is a big scary place which must be controlled! Resources must be hoarded and never shared because then Bad Things Will Happen. Fear rules the day, and nothing, no reasoning, not even having this tossed onto your plate will be able to confound that hard wiring in your mind. (Though it is useful to recognize for others so that they can understand the how and why behind freaky conservatives).
It takes work to achieve anything of any value. But once that value has been birthed into the world, why must it be paid for over and over (and over) again? "Oh, but how will the content provider be paid?" The content creator will be frickin' paid if the content is worth a damn. Even if it is 'pirated', the provider of the information will be compensated, more and more often through non-linear means. But it takes a level of insight and fearlessness to see that. Those who create insane, top-down economies like the one which is presently crashing all around our ears, want to criminalize sharing. It is not a so-called "rationalization," as the poster put it, to be offended by such a thing. This is why the Pirate Party describes itself as a political movement, and why they framed their arguments as they did.
The system MUST be crashed for sanity to reign.
And that has some people very, very scared. You'd better learn how to share pronto or you're going to be left out in the cold. Who is going to share with you when your dollars mean nothing? Quick! Better head-trip your kids with guilt and religion so they don't stop feeding you. Only Fear and Control will save you!
Pathetic.
-FL
I'm not surprised membership alone doesn't disqualify this judge. But they obviously must research all his past writings on copyright and dealings with the organizations, as well as subpoena records of all his recent large financial transactions. If they can show bias now, this will cast doubt upon all members of that organization in future.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell