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New Threats Against Pirate Bay Owners
angry tapir writes "The Pirate Bay should be closed, and if it isn't, two of the founders will each have to pay a fine of 500,000 Swedish kronor (US$71,500), according to a verdict in the Stockholm District Court. This time it's Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg who are in the court's crosshairs. They have been forced to shut down the site or pay the fine. The court has stated that the site will have to remain closed unless Neij and Warg are exonerated on another similar case they're involved in, which is now on appeal."
There is still isohunt, mininova, demonoid and torrentreactor, all based in countries with different jurisdictions. Atop of that, there is still rapidshare, mediafire, and let's not forget the ol' IRC channels. I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of The Pirate Bay, torrent greppers or the torrent trackers, though.
What will we do without THE ONLY TORRENT TRACKER?
And we don't even have an alternate tracker that tracks every TPB torrent! If only someone had made OpenBitTorrent.com in time!
In April, Fredrik Neij , Gottfrid Svartholm Warg , Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were found guilty of being accessories to crimes against copyright law
Poor copyright law, he didn't get out of the hospital for 2 weeks. I don't think he'll ever be the same.
Maybe the problem is that so many companies out there can fail because of a free internet. Then again, i wonder what other business models would fail because of a similar "free" something. Medicine? Voting? Any ideas?
They are Swedish citizens , there's EU treaties on how to deal with situations like this.
Tor can - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_services But I suspect too many people trying to connect to it, can make correlation attacks a bit easier.
I believe you're talking about Switzerland.
Sweden had a similar policy.
The crux of The Pirate Bay's existence is that it is not explicitly illegal under Swedish law to do what they do. We know what torrent technology is and how it works and how it is used. There is no need to go into that. The pirate bay tracks, indexes and serves up torrent file. It is not copyrighted data or information.
The new spin is that they have been convicted of being an accessory to copyright infringement but there is no specific instance of copyright infringement having been associated with the charge. It seems to me that you would first have to prove an offence occurred before someone can be charged with being an accessory to an offence. Can someone be charged with accessory to murder without proof that a murder took place? I understand there is a general and accepted fact that The Pirate Bay does indeed contribute to copyright infringement, but in a court of law where proof and evidence are important, it seems pretty dangerous to convict someone on established presumptions rather than fact based on evidence and that there should be an original offence, based on fact based evidence, to associate with an accessory charge.
Sweden showed that they have integrity of their judicial process by not charging TPB with copyright infringement as their laws do not identify their activities as copyright infringement. Good. But charging them as an accessory to an unidentified offence is a departure from that judicial integrity.
I worry for the rule of law when people can be charged with crimes in this way.
Correct. Generally speaking, as long as whatever you committed in a foreign jurisdiction is also a crime in your resident jurisdiction, extradition will not be a major judicial hurdle. Considering a recent Dutch judgement against the Pirate Bay, I think they'll have to do whatever the Dutch and Swedish authorities say. They should have known this, and made the site uncontrollable by a single person, so that only the cooperation of multiple people in truly different jurisdictions would be required to shut the site down, like they said they would. I'm guessing at this stage that either was a bluff from the start, or that it later turned out to be impossible for technical reasons or similar.
It's hilarious these people think going after top sites will change anything. The only people enjoying all of this is the lawyers making huge bankrolls during the court process.
When/if pirate bay goes down another 10 torrent sites will rise up to take the reigns. You can't stop it and never will. They should have learned that from Napster.
Could you imagine how the internet would look if Myspace, Facebook and Twitter was down whenever they were involved in a court case?
Much, much better than it does now, yes.
Imagine if a torrent could contain dynamic content, like a web page.
You download the torrent, the content has say thepiratebay.org indexed, somehow the creater of the official torrent can modify the files pointed to by the torrent, and thus make the piratebay itself distributed. Synchronization might be tricky...
Maybe it wouldnt work, but in any case, i look forward to seeing what great new technology all this enforcement brings us.
Two of the pirates behind the file sharing site Pirate Bay riscs a new million fine. Stockholm District Court threatens them with each SEK 500,000 in liquidated damages if the Pirate Bay won't shut down.
In April this year, the verdict fell against The Pirate Bay - in fact without anything really changed. Sharing The site was still there, as well as the illegal file sharers.
After threats of being sued decided the site operator, Black Internet, to switch off The Pirate Bay.
Despite that, the site is still maintained, so the district court decided that they'll turn against the people behind the site.
For Fredrik Neij and Gottfried Svartholm Warg, it means a civil action to enforce bans The Pirate Bay.
- If they continue to operate, they can be sentenced to pay a fine of half a million crowns to each of the state, says lawyer Monique Wadsted representing Hollywood companies in the trial of The Pirate Bay
They say that they no longer have anything to do with the management?
- They say it, but there are a host of other information they have provided, and registrations of domain names that clearly shows that they are still involved in the operation of the business.
Fredrik Neij writes in an email to DN that he has had nothing to do with the operation of The Pirate Bay in a long time, and that he therefore is already following the district court's decision.
Furthermore, he believes that it does not matter to him if the debt of the enforcement service is the 45 million or 45.5 million crowns. "It's money I will never be able to pay," he writes.
He also notifies the sentence will be appealed.
Black Internet has appealed the district court's earlier decision on the penalty. The matter is currently with the Court of Appeal.
Source: http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/nyheter/pirate-bay-hotas-av-miljonboter-1.984749
No, but we certainly have the right to download torrents, which are legal in themselves! They aren't copyrighted material; they are pointers to copyrighted material!
Watching a geek self-destruct in the courtroom is one of life's most innocent pleasures.
You have a BT client installed.
You click on a link - and the infringing file arrives piece by piece to be assembled within your computer.
No other action on your part is anticipated or required.
That is all anyone needs to know. The interior mechanics of the system are irrelevant.
TPB stop showing their files, but the torrents are still working perfectly.
TPB is one of the best trackers you could connect to.
I hope they don't close down. I'm sure they will dodge everything the governments throw at them.
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. - Nikola Tes
Torrenting and downloading is by and large an expression of civil disobedience in reaction to the complete lockdown the entertainment mafia has on the industry. Fifteen bucks for a fracking CD ? Forty for a DVD? Right.
The corporate control of who gets to be distributed is nearly absolute - wonder why there's so little good music and new artists being put out by the major labels? Wonder why FM radio sucks?
We all know it.
I'm just saying it.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Nobody has a right to illegally download copyrighted materials.
It's bad enough that copyright law restricts what can be said, written, and pictured, but restricting what can heard, read, and viewed is just way over the top. No business model is worth preserving that requires individuals to surrender such basic human freedoms.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Torrenting and downloading is by and large an expression of civil disobedience in reaction to the complete lockdown the entertainment mafia has on the industry.
Civil disobedience as an act of protest does not involve trying to dodge the punishment prescribed by the legal system - indeed, the very point of it is largely to suffer from the laws you deem unjust while attracting public attention, so that your suffering gathers sympathy for your cause.
Downloading a bunch of files from TPB isn't civil disobedience in that sense unless you're willing to go to trial, and not argue on that trial that you didn't do it, but only that the law as it stands is wrong.