Slashdot Mirror
Music Industry Suits Could Bankrupt Pirate Party Members
An anonymous reader writes "Music industry group BPI has threatened legal action against six members of the UK Pirate Party, after the party refused to take its Pirate Bay proxy offline. BPI seems to want to hold the individual members of the party responsible for copyright infringements that may occur via the proxy, which puts them at risk of personal bankruptcy. Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye criticized the latest music industry threats and reiterated that blocking The Pirate Bay is a disproportionate measure."
IIRC, the UK has a rule where the winning party is paid their legal fees by the losing side.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Bribing, threatening, or extorting, public officials should be a no-no.
Well, yes, but what's that got to do with this? Being a member of a political party doesn't make you a public official, and the only thing being threatened here is legal action, which is perfectly, well, legal.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yes, but they tend to only recover 60% of their costs, and that's only after they win. But to get to that point, they have to spend £100,000 plus in costs, which the Party doesn't have right now.
The UK doesn't have SLAPP laws. In theory, frivolous lawsuits are supposed to be shut down by the judges before they get that far. While there's no real way to counter-sue, this sort of behaviour is usually dealt with through costs orders (making the side wasting the other's time pay all the other's costs).
Of course, if the BPI win (or the Party runs out of funds first), that's another matter...
OK, so your comment is Funny...
...but here is how you can help
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Actually, that's a bit of a naughty use of numbers.
Your link says:
Album sales ($15?) each are down 3.2%
and
and single track sales (99c) are up 5.6%
That is not the growth you purport it to be.
+1
Remember their imaginative lawyers are second only to their imaginative accountants - just ask the artists...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Nope, it quite clearly says overall album sales are down 3.6%.
That does not equate to growth. In any way shape or form. They may be selling 4% more "units" - but the average value of those units is down significantly.
That is nothing! If I were a big company, I would just buy the big three, fire them all, and be done with it.
The big three are Universal Music Group Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
UMG in turn is a division of Vivendi and WMG a division of Access Industries.
Access Industries is one those blandly named, incredibly rich --- and all-but-invisible --- privately held conglomerates that seem to have a hand in almost everything: Russian oil, petrochemicals, aluminum, broadcasting, mobile communications, hotels, real estate and so on.
Vivendi's assets, which include 61% of Activision Blizzard, are worth about 56 billion euros, which is by no means pocket change.
It may have escaped the geek's attention, but companies that actually make big investments in popular entertainment --- not fantasy buy-outs on Slashdot --- tend to be very protective of their IP.
The UK does however also have a list of vexatious litigants:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/vexatious-litigants
These are people who can no longer bring civil suits because they have taken the piss too much. If the BPI files too many frivolous lawsuits it's staff (likely it's lawyers) will find themselves no longer able to practice in civil suits because they will become named on this list.
Minor corrections: They haven't won any court order against The Pirate Bay or its operators - they never took it to court (not that you can take a website to court). The won several (uncontested) orders against the 6 major UK ISPs.
Secondly, PPUk was running the proxy before the court orders were issued, so it wasn't that it was trying to frustrate the order - simply provide a service.
The issue of it being frivolous or in bad faith could come from the fact that it is trivially easy for the BPI to effectively shut down the PPUk proxy; from my understanding of the text of the court orders (which I tried to get hold of, but would have costed £95), they simply need to write a letter to the ISPs asking them to add the proxy to the existing block. But instead they've decided to go after the officers of the Party.
[Disclaimer: I work for PPUk, but am not involved in this mess any more, and don't know much more that what has been published.]