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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.
Violation of due process is violation of human rights.
Sounds very much like the Right to a fair trial is being violated -- which specifically is mentioned in the Council of Europe's "Convention on Human Rights" in 3.6 article 6.
So no, they are not being pussies.
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.'"
The fact that the defendant in this case is The Pirate Bay doesn't change the fact that they deserve a fair trial.
If you were on trial for marijuana possession but the judge was a member of dozens of groups with names such as "Stop Drugs Now", "Weed Killed My Son", "Christians for a Drug Free America" etc etc, regularly received kickbacks from commercially-run prisons (who cater specifically to drugs-related incarcerations) and frequently accepted donations from government anti-legalization lobbyists, would you consider yourself likely to receive a fair trial?
Therefore, following on from this, would you therefore say that your constitutionally protected right to a fair trial was being infringed? Would it not be a huge stretch to also say that these rights should exist to all people- become one of these so-called "human rights"?
Granted, it's not on the same level as militia machinegunning unarmed villages, but the right to a fair trial is still what I would consider a basic human right.
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FTA
(But Eka and the other judges concluded that simply endorsing the principles of copyright law was no grounds for disqualification in a trial; copyright was written into Swedish law, and judges can't be called "biased" simply because they support existing laws.
"The Court of Appeal has come to the conclusion that none of the circumstances set out, individually or taken together, means that there are legitimate doubts about the judge's impartiality in this case. There has not been any bias," concluded the court. The decision cannot be appealed")
Imagine the hideous analogies we can come up with. Judge A belongs to the bar association. Can he rule on lawyer misconduct? I am playing devil's advocate here and like I said I don't agree with the decision. I hope they win their appeal but I think human rights violation is a tad overboard. They still have their appeal.
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.
So wait, the fact that a juge is against drugs biases him against you having or not having drugs how exactly ?
Suppose you're on trial for doing something that's related to the sale of drugs but might not actually be a crime: for example, telling people which parts of town have all the dealers. Or putting up a public bulletin board which anyone can use to post any sort of information, but in practice is mostly used to post the phone numbers of drug dealers.
If the judge is an anti-drug crusader, he's more likely to (mis)interpret the law in order to declare your behavior illegal, because he wants to stop the sale of drugs, even though you might not actually have broken any laws.
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This is what you get for buying Ikea.
and judges can't be called "biased" simply because they support existing laws.
Excuse me. A judge may determine whether a law has been broken, he may set a punishment if it is proven that the law is broken, but if he supports or disapproves of a law he is biased. A judge may be in favor of all laws being enforced, but any specific law no.
Why bother
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/
Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!
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....
If he disapproves of a law, then arguably he could be considered biased as his refusal to believe a law is just might affect whether he enforces it or not, but it's hard to see how your judgment would be affected by the fact you happen to support the law being tried.
Judges are supposed to enforce the law, and do so fairly. If someone is accused of violating that law, they're supposed to ensure that person is fairly tried, with evidence that is pertinent to the case raised, irrelevancies struck out, and a fair judgment given if that someone is found guilty. Now, it's hard for me to determine why anyone who supports a law would act differently to someone who doesn't care specifically about a particular law but does care about the rule of law. If I support copyright law, am I going to try to make sure someone is found guilty of copyright infringement simply because I support the law and not due to their guilt or innocence? Why? Why would I do that? Why would I want someone innocent of the law I support found guilty? Would that not undermine the law I support rather than support it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Nobody is suing mom and pop filesharers for millions of dollars over GPL distribution violations (e.g. making a torrent of binaries without source). The GPL is there to ensure that product/service entities such as corporations play nice with many open source projects, in turn benefiting from the community and other corporations, free to focus on their own value offerings.
The way in which copyright law is being abused by the RIAA et al is entirely different to how it has been elegantly harnessed by the GPL.
Sam ty sig.
Except the behavior you describe is already illegal. Facilitating a crime is a crime.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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."
Slahsdot is pretty consistently in favor of the general concept of copyright. It frequently (and still pretty consistently) opposes particular details in some implementations.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
I know, it's turned into a place full of straw men.
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.
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
Um, most /.ers would be for a 10 year copyright with mandatory registration, decriminalization of personal file sharing, and clauses that allow non-commercial use of a product if it is abandoned. Most /.ers oppose criminalization of personal file sharing, long copyright such as the totally ridiculous life + 70 years, the ability for things to be lost when they are abandoned and oppose unreasonable penalties for infringement (such as only $50 or $100 a song, not $80000). You only need to look at a story where for-profit infringement to take place to see the majority condemns their actions.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This case was about what responsibility TPB has relating to how their service was used to break copyright law, specifically Videos. So it seams very important what the Judges opinion is of the role of copyright law in protecting large content owners. Obviously a judge who showed interest in supporting a expansion of copyright law would have more interest in setting this precedent. His interest in the manner would not have been so worrying in the case of determining actual infringement, this case was more about how far that law should extend. Infringement seams clear cut in this case, just not who can be held responsible for the infringement.
Don't forget that thepiratebay is tied to the pirate party, so it is in their interest to generate as much publicity for them as possible by "recruiting as many young people as possible to their team" with these stunts such as "biased judge", and "human rights violations", and all of the other things that their propaganda machine produces.
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.
Um, most /.ers
You've spoken to all of them have you? I remember seeing stats that barely 1% of us even comment, let alone express their opinion on copyright laws.
would be for a 10 year copyright
Which will grow 10 years every 10 years, retroactively.
with mandatory registration
That will be eliminated the first time someone claims they "forgot" to register, like it was back when we had mandatory registration.
decriminalization of personal file sharing
Woah! When did personal file sharing become criminalized? Shit, I better flush my burnt DVDs!!
and clauses that allow non-commercial use of a product if it is abandoned.
Why only non-commercial? The whole point of copyright is to financially encourage valuable activities that people would otherwise not do. If the original publisher no longer wants to publish the work and I think I can make some money publishing the work, then clearly there are people who want copies and are willing to pay for them, so why not encourage me to serve that need? Why reserve that right to someone who doesn't want it anymore?
Most /.ers
yeah, cause you know..
oppose criminalization of personal file sharing
I imagine a world where file sharing is illegal and actually enforced will be the end of personal computing.
long copyright such as the totally ridiculous life + 70 years
But.. but.. I did some work 20 years ago and my great grandchildren might have to get a job!!
the ability for things to be lost when they are abandoned
"lost" is the extreme.. how about just "rare". It's really quite sad that a book that has been in print only 5 years is so hard to get. These days I go to Amazon and click through the long list of secondhand book sellers (who, btw, the copyright owners would love to stamp out!) and eventually find one that will mail me the product for almost the same cost of new. It's a travesty.
and oppose unreasonable penalties for infringement (such as only $50 or $100 a song, not $80000).
"Penalties".. what a puritan idea. It's like we're too gutless to make this a crime and its clear that no actual damage has been done, so let's "punish" them by giving *more* money to the greedy bastards who want life+70 years for a work they couldn't even be bothered publishing 5 years after creation.
You only need to look at a story where for-profit infringement to take place to see the majority condemns their actions.
Again, you live in this fantasy where us bored minority of commenting users somehow represent the silent majority.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'll probably be modded troll for this, but this is my opinion, and agree with it or not, it is still my opinion. If you can share yours, don't be upset for me doing the same.
If you disagree with my opinion, hit reply and try to persuade me. Hit reply and cuss me out. Ignore me as a freak. But don't get pissed off because someone feels differently than you, ktnx.
Two points
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.
First, no one said that "the rights of the content creators whose material is pirated on PirateBay don't matter"
I will say it, because that is what I believe. But that is not what most slashdotters think or feel, you are just making things up and posting them.
Second, you are right, the GPL should not exist. Without copyright law, as I said I am for, the GPL *wouldn't* exist!
Copyright needs abolished. And before you say "How do you expect artists to be compensated?", the answer is, by getting a job like everyone else. No one should have any say so or right to control the sharing of what is in your head.
That covers both the things I come up with in my head myself and share, OR the things in my head put there by others who clearly choose to share them by making them public.
Copyright is not about doing squat for artists or 'content creators' as you call them, except for limiting their rights.
How can a law that, while yes protecting that fraction of 0.001% of the thoughts you made, but in exchange for removing your right to use the other 99.999% of the thoughts in your mind that came from 'outside', usually from another fellow human being? That is not protecting your rights, its removing them.
While most of slashdot is all about making copyright sane, all they are arguing over is how restricted is ok, 99.999% or just 99.991%, simply because one number is lower than the other.
Humanity developed language more complex than any other primate (or life of any sort for that matter) just to share the ideas and thoughts in our heads. That is such an insanely great accomplishment of history!
And now, very recently compared to the rise of human language, a small group of people are wanting to reverse that effect and prevent us from sharing those ideas that brought about civilization.
It's an all or nothing solution. We are either free, or not. There can be no middle ground. Our society will either have to control all of it or none of it. Our communications will either have to be monitored or free, our privacy to be either continuously probed or protected.
Copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off our freedoms until we cut it off at the root.
The right to copy and imitate, to share ideas and information, is a right that exists independently of our government.
Gravity is not made or destroyed by the government, nor are rights. Just as gravity can not be bought or sold for the sake of the will of others, nor can rights. Rights are observable.
We evolved to use language to share our ideas. Language wouldn't need to exist as it does if not. Humanity would not be where it is today, and you would not be in a civilized nation to create ideas, if it wasn't for the ideas that were shared before you were born. You have NO say so about that changing. It will not. It can not.
And finally
Conclusion--if copyright is wrong, then so is the GPL.
Exactly.
They were found guilty of assisting in making copyrighted materials available.
Except as swedish law was *always* applied before, you had to actually charge the people who *made* the materials available. You were not allowed to charge just the accessories. Thus, the charges and subsequent conviction push the law past where it was allowed to previously apply.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
No, but this was not the case either.
The organisations that he was a member of were for having tougher punishments for copyright violations.
So a more suitable analogy:
How a bout a judge who publicly states that he is for tougher sentences for murder and in an interest organisation working for capital punishment being the only verdict for murder.
Can he sit in a murder case.
My answer to this would be NO.
The thing is not whether he is for the law or not, a judge must be for the rule of law in general, so this is not really the point.
However, his membership in organisations that are for tougher punishments, clearly indicate that he is biased in this aspect. I don't doubt his qualifications to deliver a guilty/not-guilty verdict, but since the judge is involved in sizing the punishment, where there is considerable room of choice for him, he is not suitable for ruling on what the punishment should be.
The second thing, which I think is also true in America is that a judge will be considered bias if there is a risk for the public confidence in the legal system, whatever your opinions about these organisations are (they are not appropriate in my meaning, and he could probably have chosen better and less biased organisations to join), you cannot really deny that people are loosing their faith in the legal system for this. That is very troubling in my mind.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Interesting. Speaking as a disinterested party (I don't see any heroes or villains here), this seems like an appropriate closing of a loophole.
It's pretty common for new technologies to create new loopholes that the original framers of a law did not intend -- here I'm referring to the legal system in general, and not specifically copyright code or any country in particular. These loopholes tend to get closed quickly. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, law books abhor a loophole.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
28 years (14 initially + 14 more if applied for an extension) is the original term at the time copyright was originally written into the U.S. constitution.
Personally, I still think it's still too much. What I wouldn't mind is some way wherein you get a few years for free, and then you have to pay some nominal amount of money to keep your copyright, which grows progressively. If your stuff really is so popular that it's making heaps of money, then you can presumably use a share of that to keep it going. And if it's not making money, then keeping it just prevents others from creating (potentially useful) derived works... so let it expire; or pay for the privilege of denying others - either way, a net benefit for the society.
Closing those loopholes is not the task of a district court. The only ones that have the right to make new interpretations of the law, or change it is in Sweden:
1. Supreme court of Sweden, EC Court and the European human rights court
2. The riksdag and the European Council in conjunction with the European Parliament.
There is no case law in Sweden, except for the one that the supreme court makes. This also include civil cases.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
So why are Slashdotters constantly opposed to copyright and in favor of piracy except in GPL violation articles?
Are you too boneheaded to understand that Slashdotters may not all think in the same way? That one subset of Slashdotters may support piracy, and another subset may support the GPL. It's a pretty simple concept actually, I'm surprised that you don't understand it, unless you are a troll of course.
Very very very bad analogy.
If my neighbour spends his time acting as a local directory enquiries for drug dealers, I am very very keen for that guy to be arrested.
Just because he isn't handling drugs doesn't mean he isn't helping facilitate a drug problem in my area.
Its amazing the crazy bullshit that gets rationalised by people who want to justify pirating music.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Nobody is suing mom and pop filesharers for millions of dollars over GPL distribution violations (e.g. making a torrent of binaries without source).
That's not a GPL violation.
DMCA won't allow you to copy personal DVDs right? Otherwise it was a marvelous troll.
why was the trial not fair?
The judge believes in and supprots swedish law. You seriously would prefer a system where judges make up the law on their own?
besides, if TPB are right and what they are doing is legal 'under swedish law' wtf are they worried about?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games