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Pirate Bay Legal Action Dropped In Norway
superapecommando writes "Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said. The copyright holders, led by Norway's performing rights society TONO and by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Norway (IFPI Norge), have lost two rounds in the Norwegian court system, and have now decided against appealing the case to Norway's supreme court."
I pay a monthly Sky subscription of ~£15/month. I just signed up to sky.com's Sky Player and supplied account info so they knew it was really me, who pays my subscription. They recognized the packages I subscribe to. I wanted to catch up with a House, MD episode. They wanted to charge me £1.50 to 'rent' it (ie. play it once in their player). I just torrented it.
As long as media corporations are so unreasonable, I reserve the right to say, fuck them. Copyright law should be reformed to allow people to pay what is reasonable, then pirate on a noncommercial basis. It's the lesser of the evils, vs. corps charging what the market will bear.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Maybe they do not want to lose in the Norwegian Supreme Count that would allow invalidation of ACTA if it is ever implemented in its current terrible form. Governments should not be involved in a the failure of a business model. Organizations like the RIAA need to stop treating their Customers like Criminals.
The reason why they keep losing in court is because of strong privacy laws in Norway. In order to sue anyone for downloading copyrighted material, it would require the ISPs to identify users by IP addresses, something which is a very big no-no here.
Actually, they don't get that far. The biggest blocker for them right now is that their license to store private surveillance data from public networks has been refused by the Data Inspectorate, so they simply aren't getting started. The police is obviously not wasting their time investigating it. Right now the winds are blowing quite strongly in the direction of privacy, we may *crosses fingers* refuse EU's data storage directive, that'll be a first in 16 years.
In Sweden they know that any real anti-piracy crackdown would bring the Pirate Party into parliament, despite all the noise when the Pirate Party entered the EU parliament last year there's been essentially no legal activity and the file sharing is already at new heights, higher than before the FRA law, It's no wonder why they make their best offers like free Spotify in Scandinavia, they're trying desperately to hold the flood gates.
It's just like when Microsoft sees they could lose their dominance somewhere and offer a supergood deal to keep them on Windows. They know if copying for non-commercial use is legalized in one country, that country will become the center of all hubs and trackers and seedboxes and vpn services bringing the whole house of cards down. And technology keeps working against them all the time, if you have a 1 Mbit line letting someone leech from you really eats into your bandwidth but if you have 100 Mbit you barely notice. It's just borrowing away a little bit of what you're not using yourself.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Pirating is not free. Everybody takes a risk by pirating of being sued or wasting our time downloading malware, something of bad quality, or bogus files.
But, even still, it is always much easier to pirate a movie (for instance) than it is to purchase it. I think most of us who pirate don't just do so because it is free, but also because the non-pirated versions are often DRM-laden, low-quality, and expensive and we are forced to jump through hoops just to get the content we desire.
For instance, let's say I want to buy the movie "Rounders." What are my options?
1) Go to the store and buy it for nearly $15 after tax. I would have to drive half way across town and waste a bunch of time. Not to mention $15 is a little steep for an older movie.
2) Use an online service like Amazon Video on Demand. What? Rounders isn't available? Darn. Even if it were, I would have to pay $3-4 to watch it once or about $10 to "own" it. But owning it only means I can watch it on amazon.com or download it and watch it through their player. What? Their player isn't available on linux? Darn? And I can't play the videos on my netbook (the only computer I own) because a flash-embedded high-quality video plays at about 3 frames per second.
3) I can go to thepiratebay.org and download Rounders. It takes a half hour to an hour to download a decent quality movie. It uses a standard codec so this high-resolution movie plays wonderfully on my netbook. There is no DRM or flash player to worry about. I have this movie for as long as I want it and can watch it whenever (and on whatever) I want even if I don't have an internet connection.
If a movie studio started selling XVID (or some other decent codec) movies on their website similar to those found on thepiratebay for a reasonable price ($5) without DRM or any of that other garbage, you can bet your youngest child that I would spend the money rather than pirating it. This new distribution channel (the internet) is changing the way we want to get content and also making distribution cheaper. But the movie studios and distributors are trying to fight this change after it has already happened. Pirating is newly part of the free market system just as was copying your friend's MC Hammer cassette tape. You can make all the arguments you want about pirates pirating because it is free; but, until the distributors make their content available in a decent format at a decent price and allow their consumers the freedom to use this content as desired, your claim doesn't hold as much water.