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Swedish Court Finalizes Jail Sentence For Pirate Bay Co-Founder
Mightee sends in this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million."
Nobody knows where he is. He probably fled the country and will create a new identity for himself.
Here's to hoping, anyway.
I don't think they got rich off of TPB.
"In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million SEK (US$168,885.60) per year from advertisements."
"In the 2009 trial, the defense estimated the site's yearly expenses to be 800,000 SEK (US$112,590.40)"
Probably went to score some hot ladyboy action.
Why not?
Its out of the reach of Sweden, and internet close to anywhere.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That is one best excuses for not coming to court that I have ever heard!
There's DHT. Tracker sites are nothing more than a convenience nowadays.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd heard they were more like upscale college dorms than prison cells.
are you sure it wasn't Somalia?
Pirate Bay was a lot smaller in 2006 and they had mostly adult ads, not the type of ads they have now. They also didn't employ as good shell company structure with their Seychelles company as they do now.
The income with torrent sites is currently around $50 per 1000 unique visitors, mostly from toolbar (those "download from fast server now"), usenet and vpn provider ads. TPB currently has global Alexa rank #84. Quantcast currently estimates TPB gets 200k unique visitors per day, and that is only US traffic. They get huge amount of traffic everywhere from the world. But just from that US traffic alone, TPB probably makes around 200000*(50/1000) = $10 000 per day.
That translates to $3 650 000 per year, almost four million dollars. And then you also have to add traffic and income from all the other countries apart from US, which probably brings the income close to ten million dollars a year.
Posted anonymously because I have also ran a torrent site. That means, I also know the kind of income such get from ads.
There are many ways to start a new life somewhere else though, web admins can work from anywhere with a wire to the www and make money. The whole case is BS though since piratebay is still up and running, what are they trying to prove here? That they can sentence people whenever they feel like it?
I love how when the courts get bad PR, nothing happens, when a company gets bad PR they go out of business. HMMMM
I haven't seen him in any of the bars.
The summary is wrong. TFA:"This means that the Pirate Bay co-founder is sentenced to a year in jail and his share of 30 million kronor ($4.48m) in damages."
Maybe he wanted to see Angkor Wat, maybe he wanted to see unspoiled jungles, maybe because the Cambodian people are really friendly, or because he wanted to try the food and experience the culture.
There are plenty of good reasons why people vacation in south-east Asia (and, admittedly, some shady ones). I've known lots of people who have been to Thailand and Cambodia and Vietnam for vacations ... I'm just not willing to fly that far.
Hell, my next vacation is going to be in Cuba ... because it's affordable, and incredibly safe, the people are friendly and the weather is awesome. The most enjoyable and relaxing week of my entire year.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I donno why he moved there, bust most like he's missing because the MafiAA simply put a hit out on him. It's nice they waited till he moved outside civilized legal systems.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Maybe he just REALLY liked Dead Kennedys
Basic intimidation. It's the standard way to enforce a law when there are far too many violators to prosecute even a tiny fraction. Pick a few prominent examples, and then utterly destroy their lives. That will serve to scare many of the others straight.
Not their style. They don't break the law - they are just experts in using the law to their own advantage. They won't break their own rules.
i have nothing to add about it, it's just hard to work that meme into /. any more
Its not capitalist, which apparently is a huge draw for many.
One might wonder that more people havent flocked there, actually. Oh wait, I know why.
Yeah, but there is a nice extradition agreement between there and many countries like the US, EURO block, and elsewhere since they all have their troops there trying to keep the country together. He could try his hand in the autonomous regions, but if you are not a muslim (and of the correct sect), you had better start learning....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
It's very nearly almost four million dollars, though.
I ran those numbers by my Hollywood based accountant, and his calculations resulted in a net loss of about $3000 a day.
Added bonus #1. It pisses off Americans because they can't go there. Added bonus #2. No Americans. Excuse me while I call my travel agent.
As an American who has been to Cuba I can tell you that bonus #1 isn't necessarily true. As for bonus #2, the United States hardly has a monopoly on obnoxious tourists. Last time I was in Cairo a series of Greek tourists were being kicked out for using the museum as their personal climbing wall, and outside a group of Japanese tourists asked to take my picture confusing me (and my olive complexion) as an Egyptian.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Yep, Cambodia isn't really that safe. It's much safer in Thailand for example. However, I go to Cambodia 3-4 times a year to renew my Thai visa and stay there a couple a weeks, but it always feels kind of unsafe. And last time I was there hundreds of people died on that Phnom Penhs bridge when it got too crowded. If you have to go to hospital, you really don't want to go to Cambodian hospital anyway - every foreigner should try to get to either to Thailand or Singapore in that case, and it's touted everywhere on the web. This is also why I don't think the TPB admin really had to go to hospital.
Buying Lobster dinners for $1?
I wouldn't put it past them though.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
They are not taken down. The site was down a couple of days after the raid that started the whole thing (back in June 2006!), but has been up ever since with the odd downtime for planned maintainance or technical screwups. It's just run by different people.
It is most definitely not quite four million.
Think if they upheld the same amount that Thomas chic was liable for at $80,000USD per song.
And that worked out so well during prohibition now didn't it...?
All this does is breed contempt for the law which is evident from both your take on this and the revenue TPB is supposedly getting. When you try to regulate a natural human activity that has been with us since the age of caves or even earlier, you should expect to be both ignored and ridiculed.
And as far as the average US citizen is concerned, you run into good old fashion orneriness where those who would not even have cared about the topic will simply do it just to thumb their noses at the stupidity...
Coldmoon over Dark water...
Because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing
Yeah..... that's exactly what happened Please.. the man has money and no interest in giving it back or spending time in jail. He's long gone folks. Any sane person would have done the same thing.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
If the founder in question here was making huge numbers off TPB a few years ago (2008, maybe), it didn't show in his wardrobe, hairstyle or choice of place to crash or his mode of transportation.
I saw him staying with friends in one of the socio-economically crappiest suburbs of Stockholm and taking the subway wherever he was going.
I'm not saying he wasn't a millionaire, but if he was, it was like some character said in some (iirc) Tzingiz Aitmatov story:
"I'm just a poor person with lots of money".
I think this person is a principled person. I might be wrong, but this is the vibe I got from happening to pass him by on the street a few years ago.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
I'll just go ahead and reply to myself regarding possible ambiguities in my above post:
By the comparison to the Aitmatov (?) quote, I didn't mean to imply that he came from a poor background, because I don't know about that and since his name is actually Donald Duckishly aristocratic to a swede. What I meant was that I felt he is (or at least was) true to his ... roots as an information freedom-fighter.
Also, I didn't just happen by him once, but a few times - on the streets of the "ghetto" (as far as we have them) and on the u-bahn.
Anyway. Histories of current persons in bodies, while perhaps titillating, are not more important than the ideas they put forth. So, you know, whatever.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
There is an underlying problem to all this...
when I buy an album, almost no money goes to the person actually making the music. The money goes to the RIAA who are the ones prosecuting people with that same money. Etc, we've all heard this before.
I'm dead serious though, if the artist made the money, and cds didn't cost $15 a pop (adds up very quick when u want new music, currently at the rate the artists typically make off the media, I can buy enough to last me years for $15 TOTAL), I would consider not supporting what TPB is doing, but since a bunch of assholes in suites who don't know how to play a musical instrument or have any talent are mooching off the industries, TPB has not only survived, it's thriving and the DNS nowadays is pretty hard to get at from my understanding.
It doesn't go to RIAA, it goes to record labels. Those record labels who supported and lend money to the artists to make and record their songs, supported them, advertised them and handled distribution for them. Of course the record label needs to get it's investment back, otherwise they would go bankrupt.
Umm, they frequently break copyright law!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I just took a look at TPB and all I see is low quality filler ads all from the same agency (z5x.net). I can't realistically see them making more than around $0.02 / 1000 page views from those kinds of ads.
Also, I run a site with alexa rank a little over 10,000 which gets just under 3 million page views and around 100,000 uniques a day, so I doubt TPB gets anywhere close to the guess provided by Quantcast.
Anyway, if you were making the insanely good ad rates you are suggesting, post links to the advertiser sites -- I am looking for better advertisers.
It pisses off Americans because they can't go there.
Why go to Cuba when you can go to The Dominican, Jamaica, or for that matter pretty much any other Caribbean island?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
If you are going to be a Pirate, then you better have the testicular fortitude to face the consequences. Be a Martyr!
That's because you're failing to see what actually ads. Take a look at the torrent details pages. The big download button is an advertisement to a toolbar that pays $1-2 per install, and many users install those (either because they're clueless or just otherwise). There's also another "advertisement" to their tube site that is filled with all kinds of ads. That's their main source of income, not those z5x.net ads. Besides, even for those ads the CPM is $2-3 per 1000 page views.
You may or may not be under the misconception that we don't also have lot's of people from all over here in Sweden (as an example).
The ratios of coordinates at which nearby persons parents (or parents parents and so on) initiated their chains of chemical reactions that resulted in the hominidae that are you and me and those around us may differ significantly (like I don't think I've met a Cuban in my hood), but this particular suburb of Stockholm, Sweden is very much diverse. Surely 100 or 150 plus national origins. Only about 15-20 or something % white traditional "Swedes", though.
Majority/minority culture is interesting. They/we as whites/cityslickers/Americans don't know about the plight of colored/hicks/anyone.
I'll just go ahead and end this comment right about here.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
See point #2
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
All of that chest-beating on their site about takedown notices, and when they actually _get_ taken down their co-founder runs off to a foreign country and hides to avoid the consequences, scurrying away from the lights like a cockroach.
Um, those letters on the site make it pretty clear he's a pirate. Pirates pull crazy schemes to avoid jail. Or did you not download Pirates of the Carribean on TPB? ;)
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Find one nation in the world that didn't do that sort of shit
"He should have went to Afghanistan where is no such thing as copyright legislation."
The POTUS can kill anyone at will, and the Dems are the "Party of Disney".
He'd be as safe in A-stan as Fred Phelps would be in Mecca.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Tracker sites are required to get the torrent. Trackers are where the convenience lies.
You're not following...
Why would an American get pissed about not being "allowed" to go somewhere that has perfectly acceptable alternatives?
Because they're no Americans there? That's like saying, "You know what sucks about not eating Mac and Cheese? The fact that if you don't eat it, you can't complain about how bad it tastes."
If all you wanted to do was vacation in places where there are no Americans, why not just go to certain neighborhoods in South Florida? Or Texas? Or California?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
If you are going to be a Pirate, then you better have the testicular fortitude to face the consequences. Be a Martyr!
Either that, or escape with your treasure and live out your days in luxury in an exotic paradise.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
the same labels that then deduct those costs from the artists' already small piece of the pie?
really, for a $15 cd, the people that created it should be getting at least $5.
...
You run a (profitable) torrent tracker and you take vacations in third-world asian countries?
Despite Pol Pot, the carpet bombing, and agent orange of the 70's, Cambodia is still a beautiful country where nowadays a millionaire can afford to live like a billionaire.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well, it's up to them to make the contracts and not us on slashdot, isn't it? It's not like anyone forces them to join a label. They can choose.
Last time I checked, you dont need a tracker site to get a .torrent file because you can just use a magnet link. .torrent files)
Although then you have the situation where you need a site to collect magnet links (and its likely that big-movie-studio-favoring courts will consider magnet links just as infringing as
Yeah sightseeing in chinatown. Sounds reeeally fun ...
What does being a martyr achieve in this case? It wont unite the pirates.
No, far better to reassert to the authorities that they do not control people in the digital age like they used to, that chasing pirates is laughably futile and that it's better to work with them and provide them with reasonable content at reasonable prices than against them in pointless litigation that's cost them far more pursuing than they'll ever hope to get back from it.
You're thinking of Thailand.
Cambodia is where you go for kids. Ask Gary Glitter.
If the founder in question here was making huge numbers off TPB a few years ago (2008, maybe), it didn't show in his wardrobe, hairstyle or choice of place to crash or his mode of transportation.
Maybe he was just playing it smart by not flaunting his money. Either that, or he was dumb and got screwed out of the money somebody else was making. There's no way Pirate Bay wasn't raking in the cash given all their views.
Well, only the ridiculous and useless laws.
Why go to Cuba when you can go to The Dominican, Jamaica, or for that matter pretty much any other Caribbean island?
But if he did go to one of those places you'd be asking him the same question. There's no particular reason *not* to go to Cuba. It's a big Caribbean island with its own unique culture. For an American it also has the extra plus of being forbidden by our insane government. Forbidden fruit is always sweeter. It's also the only place in the world that I know of where an ugly geek can rent/lease a girlfriend. At least you used to be able to. You can't even do that in Thailand. There are also not many better places to drink rum and dance, if you are into that sort of thing. Although I think Cuban rum is overrated. It also used to be very safe. Over the past decade it has become less and less safe as the younger generation, weaned on violent American films, has come of age.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Why would an American get pissed about not being "allowed" to go somewhere that has perfectly acceptable alternatives?
Have you ever been to Cuba? What would you consider an alternative?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
a) demonstrably false
b) true
c) Actually they are quite friendly, but only in a shallow, looking-for-a-chance-to-rip-you-off friendly. Many people don't see through the false surface friendliness however until they get burned. Of course once you actually live there you can make real friendly like anywhere else. Just never talk to anyone who approaches you first.
d) Agreed. There is nothing special about the weather. It's the culture that is special, or rather, unique. Not in a good or bad way. Just different. Especially from the places you mention.
BTW, Fidel has been out of office for years now. His brother Raul has been at the helm. Not that much has changed.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
And you think there is copyright legislation in Cambodia? Obviously you've never been to the Russian Market in Phnom Penh. Cambodia is actually a pretty nice place. I wouldn't mind living there. And is there any other place where you can see 2 adults, 3 children, and a dog all riding on the same motorbike? Frankly I envy him. With that kind of money you could live like a king there until the end of your days. The language is hard though. No tones, but lots of difficult phonemes.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
explain to me how to get a CD on a shelf at walmart with out being on a big label? how about target? sam goody(do those still exist?)?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
It might seem absurd to you, but why should the RIAA get a 90% cut for this? They are clearly being a middle man rather than a productive entity, some artists start their own record labels and go that route, they manage to get onto Wal-Mart shelves - the RIAA. What if the system changed enough where an artist can sign a contract to get their cd produced without the RIAA and pay for the cost of production + labor from wherever via contract to sell X cds, etc... Sure you can fail hard at this, but such is life, don't publish shitty music, I'm sure Wal-Mart would QC what gets produced too.
Also, look around, CDS are 90% dead, digital mp3 is in, and yet the RIAA is still involved. Do you really need the RIAA to post your music to napster by uploading your mp3s? No?
I have a hard time believing there are still people who think the RIAA serves a legit purpose since they seem to be more focused on enforcing copyright than promoting new artists. Mainstream rock of late has kind of been displeasing to my ears. Then some fag on the radio calls Avenged the next Metallica, yawn.