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The Pirate Bay Is Being Sued Again
BuR4N writes with news that 10 US movie companies have filed a suit in Swedish civil court seeking to shut down The Pirate Bay and impose a fine on its three former operators, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well as the site's bandwidth supplier. Speaking to TorrentFreak, Sunde said, "It's another day in the whole soap opera of TPB. They're suing us in Stockholm where none of us live. They're suing us over something which we don't own. I think the most funny part of the whole suit is that they just write: 'Reservella is a company run by Fredrik Neij' — out of 40 pages of paper that's all they have to say, and it's so wrong. They have no paperwork to back it up." Meanwhile, plans for The Pirate Bay to be sold to Global Gaming X seem to have stalled.
More big media companies going after money. Maybe it is just my thought but why can't American companies just bother the Americans and not everyone else. This is why people hate us!
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
The 'content' companies are either geniuses or morons in how they throw lawsuits out like last year's fashions. If some stick, win! If not, raise prices or sue another grandma. I don't know Swedish law or how the court system works, but from the summary (no, I did not RTFs) this sounds like a wild shot in the dark.
I do not believe in piracy, but I also do not believe in the 'content' companies policies, rules, or regulations. Exactly why do we still need region coding on DVDs? At least I still have my local library to rent (for free, well, except for local taxes) books.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Wow. In highschool, I always thought expanding a 3-page term-paper into a 4-page term-paper was kinda rough, but could always be done by tweaking the font-size (ie. 13pt instead of 12pt) or line-spacing (ie. 2.1 instead of standard double-spacing)... but turning 8 words into a 40 page document?!? I am humbled.
Karma: NaN
Remember TPB had a link right off the home page of correspondence? It was with lawyers from Sony BMG, and other places. Usually it was a legalize Cease and Desist type letter.
The TPB guys would usually respond with some really funny snarky shit. Like "Dear Sirs, here in Sweden we think your shit attitude needs to get bent over a stool."
In some cases, they would piss the other side off so much they would drop the formal language and start spewing, like "you little shits, we're gonna find you and shut your asses down." It was hilarious to read them simply pissing on the leather shoes of expensive lawyers and telling them to fuck off.
Well, you do that enough and you get high on powerful enemy hit lists. Don't kid yourself, power multinationals bought off that Swedish judge and make this into a kangaroo court. It's probably one of the biggest travesties of justice of all time, the slope is so fucking slippery. They may as well sue the IETF or ARIN for giving out IP addresses to enable piracy. That's how egregious the law was twisted for the interests of powerful capitalists.
Now? Now they are laying on the hurt to teach the world a lesson.
They havn't commited any crimes or "illigal behaviour". Unless you're talking about the extemly vague "participation", according to a judge with none to small insight in how the their technology worked, that was biased (according to common sense, he was a member of a copyright organization), in a trial that spawned from an investigation by a cop that quit and got a job at Warner Bros.
TPB is hashmapping files and tracking what hashes diffrent IP addresses downloads. Since they where not publishing, nor distributing, any material, they had no obligation to filter it. Linking is not a crime.
By selling the company they where actually doing the industry a favour, trying to make it more compliant. Two things could happen, it could either transform into something better, or it would be the death of TPB (most likely). Both scenarios are favourable by the industry. But since the distributors rather kill themselves than ever regonizing anything that could spawn out of the pirate community, they choose to sue them some more, kick them while they're laying down.
"Intellectual Property" (sic) has just become the most valuable thing on the planet. So, naturally enough, the wealthier portion of humanity wants to own and control most of it.
It is also "abundant," (can be replicated infinitely, by anyone, at zero cost).
So, as we have seen before, the wealthy destroy this abundance by passing laws to create artificial scarcity. They have every incentive to do this.
The flippant public attitude that TPB is showing will not protect them from the wrath of the rich.
I will add....America has very few exports now. IP is basically it. So, it is in the interest of America's wealthy to impose strict IP laws (and hence artificial scarcity) all over the planet.
It isn't that they refuse to listen to reason....it is that they are following their obvious incentives to their logical conclusions. Expect more. Much more.