Slashdot Mirror
European Human Rights Court Rejects Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal
A bit over a year since having their case rejected by the Swedish Supreme Court and appealing to the European Human Rights Court, it looks like basically all legal options have been exhausted for the Pirate Bay Founders: their case has been rejected. From the article: "The EHCR recognizes that the Swedish verdict interferes with the right to freedom of expression, but ruled that this was necessary to protect the rights of copyright holders. In its decision the Court also considered the fact that The Pirate Bay did not remove torrents linking to copyrighted material when they were asked to. 'The Court held that sharing, or allowing others to share files of this kind on the Internet, even copyright-protected material and for profit-making purposes, was covered by the right to "receive and impart information" under Article 10 ... However, the Court considered that the domestic courts had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake – i.e. the right of the applicants to receive and impart information and the necessity to protect copyright – when convicting the applicants and therefore rejected their application as manifestly ill-founded.'"
the french constitutional concil justified Hadopi by the balance between freedom of expression and property rights.
If freedom of expression (which doesn't really legaly exist in Europe as strongly as in the US) must always be balanced with property rights, only money can really speaks its mind.
Well that's O.K then.
Wait...what?
What we will do? The court decided there is no right to take someone elses work without paying for it when that person does not freely give it away, nor does one have the right to provide links to such works with the tacit understanding and a wink that the person with the link does not have the right to give the work away.
Oh noes! We can't use the excuse that taking someone elses works, without paying them for it when they don't give it away themselves, isn't a human right!
Those evil European judges, taking away my right to be cheap and not pay someone for their work!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
As are the people devoted to destroying it and circumventing it as possible, forever, on general principle.
"The EHCR recognizes that the Swedish verdict interferes with the right to freedom of expression, but ruled that this was necessary to protect the rights of copyright holders."
No place on earth is safe from copyright law. How about space?
1. Once a corporation has established a revenue stream, laws shall be written and amended as necessary to sustain this revenue stream. The only entity that may interfere with such a revenue stream is a larger corporation.
The EHCR recognizes that the Swedish verdict interferes with the right to freedom of expression, but ruled that this was necessary to protect the rights of copyright holders.
Copyrights are officially worth more than human rights.
"However, the Court considered that the domestic courts had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake"
Remember kids, it's RIGHTLY BALANCED when you spend months or years in jail, become forced into financial problems and have any chance at a 9-5 career ruined if you mess with the rightsholders.
Meanwhile, it's RIGHTLY BALANCED for rightsholders to attempt to dictate sweeping changes to the internet.
Copyright and Patent rights (are temporary, they are supposed to become public domain within a reasonable amount of time. 10 years was the limit - it should return to that for copyright, but for Patents - should revert to about 2 or 3 years due to the speed at which improvements occur.
In either case, a temporary right cannot be held to be greater than a permanent right.
The rights of corporations shall not be greater than a single human being's rights.
This needs to be the rule of the land everywhere.
In the end, the website never hosted any actual copyrighted content. Prosecuting the owners of a website that hosts links and nothing more is insanity. Because of this case, it sets a precedent for prosecution against big players like Google and Facebook if they don't make strong efforts to remove any such links, as apparently a website is 100% responsible for every link it has, regardless of where the content of that link is actually hosted or what the content of that link is.
How anyone can be okay with this abuse of due process and the law is beyond me. This is not good for the future of internet freedom and neutrality, and ultimately freedom of expression, as this court so gleefully pushed aside for the sake of a few corporate dollars.
Where is the proof that it is necessary to protect copyright, or is this just something we all assume is true?
The result of this decision ended any hope I held for democratic acknowledgement of the fact that copyright law, in its current form, has no place in the modern world. I'm now officially a black hat and hereby vow not to further waste energy on legal/political approaches to copyright.
"The defendant once watched a movie at a friends house and he didn't own a copy of it. The majority of the movie is now physically and biochemically stored in his brain. Therefor, he is technically in possession of copyrighted materials and by describing a scene in the movie to another friend, thus sharing it, he is violating some 1200 (exaggeration) copyright laws." - At this point, I am honestly waiting for the day this article is published.
Copyright has not been temporary since the advent of the Mouse.
Human Rights may include the right to freedom of expression. It does not follow that human rights include the freedom to copy someone else's entertainment work.
There would be a much stronger case if we were talking, for example, about protest videos or the like. And a significantly stronger case if we were talking about art making a political statement. But mostly we're talking about people who can't afford to or don't want to pay (high) market rates for entertainment. It is bad that we criminalize it, and insane that we make it a felony, but it's not a human right to get the entertainment of your choice cheaply.
The problem isn't that it's wrong to criminalize copyright theft to a small degree--it's that our criminal systems are designed so badly that small degrees of criminality can have extreme consequences.
We know you're right and all about this freedom of expression thingy but you know, we have to consider the rights of these companies that paid to get us into office so sorry, you know, we got to do right by them and you know, if we get into this business of free speech then you know, we might not get paid in the future. You know, a man's gotta earn his living, I've got a family to feed lobster to and you know, these cars they gave me aren't going to maintain themselves.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of a torrent:
"The Court held that sharing, or allowing others to share files of this kind on the Internet..."
Torrents do neither of those. A torrent is merely an instruction set that the client uses to connect to other clients, where the sharing and allowing takes place. Providing that instruction set is no more sinister than my telling you how to get across a river: my having given you directions to the nearest bridge should not implicate me in the murder you committed after following those directions.
It is what the client does or does not do with the information provided by a torrent that is most relevant to the potential act of copyright infringement. Of course, big media knows and understands this; they also know how damned expensive it is to address properly, which is why we're now subject to such abortions of justice as seen here with TBP.
I guess that means all works are the result of theft.
Ug wants his stuff back.
(ps very few people have not gone over the speed limit so I guess that shows that cars should be banned, right?)
My old question used to be - what if you had a replicator and could copy anything to have one of your own, would you use it?
Now I ask - if you do a 3D scan of an object and print out multiple copies of it and give them away for free, are you breaking the law?
The technology to do this reliably at-home for cheap isn't there, yet, but it will be. You can already get 3D models of objects with a Kinect.
They contacted a human rights court? Thats the act of a desperate and very guilty person.
They did wrong, no matter how you slice it, no matter how you word it, or try and justify it, at the end of the day what they did was illegal and now they are paying the price for it. They must have really had some balls to try and contact a human rights group.
That would be like a guy who gets caught robbing a bank and is caught mid robbery, is on video and seen by dozens of people and when he goes to court he wants a human rights group to get him out. As if to say he assumes because he is guilty that human rights will allow him to go free.
Read a book.
A bit over a year since having their case rejected by the Swedish Supreme Court a
- I would like to go over the personal computers of these Swedish Supreme Court members with a fine brush and reveal all of their own personal transgressions related to various copyright violations.
You can't handle the truth.
... take someone's copyrighted work without paying them for it. Or, abet the taking and distribution of copyrighted work. It's really very simple and has nothing at all to do with freedom of speech. And someone posting on the internet that it DOES have something to do with freedom of speech or otherwise rationalize that it's o.k. to take copyright work without paying for it, doesn't make it so. And if you DO think like that, then I hope you enjoy your date with that French model you met on the internet.
They pointed to where it was already available by someone else. And they are going to prison for that. Even though there are laws protecting them from that. Even though those laws that protect them from that and they did not comply with do not actually cover this issue. See, the DMCA in the US only covers hosting the content yourself. Google could tell the copyright cartels to fuck off and shut down their automated DMCA notice service immediately as they are doing nothing wrong according to existing law by pointing to infringing content, because *that is not illegal!*
Apparently though now copyright theft is legally equivalent to illegal drugs.
If you tell someone where to buy illegal drugs, you are committing a crime in the US and can go to prison for it. Regardless that you may not buy, sell, or use them yourself.
Now apparently even if you do not even have the infringing material in question, you are still guilty of a crime if you point to where infringing content is available. At least according to Sweden and the EU parliament.
That's why its a free speech issue. See, you are only telling people where to find it. You did not make a program to circumvent any protections on it. You did not make thousands of copies. You did not sell copies. You did not even download a copy. You talked about where to get one. Admittedly you gave specific information, but what is the difference between that and telling someone to Google for it? Or the difference between telling them to Google for it and telling them to try looking online? Is criminality of information sharing dependent upon how specific your information is then? Where do you draw the line?
captcha: common
Why haven't we fixed that yet?
What, precisely, is wrong with "being so semantic"? Do you know what the word semantic means? It means "meanings".
I.e. the definition of words.
If you don't want words to mean what they mean, then it's open season. I call it not "theft" but "peace and prosperity".
Are you against TPB bringing peace and prosperity to the world?
But oddly enough, I can't claim that my money is on loan, not given.
And apparently the copyright owners want free access to the public domain but don't want the public free access to their derivatives.
but Copyrights are: Life of the author + 70 years in the US.
Therefore, by enforcement of the World Police (tm), this is law everywhere!
Corporate profits must flow exponentially, at all costs and forever.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
And I AM the owner of a LOT of collectors editions of games, a LOT of anime inspired statues which all are basically about paying a 50 bucks premium price at least for bits of plastic costing at most a few dollars to produce.
I am willing to spend. What I am NOT willing to do is to be dollared to death. I know the usual phrase is "nicke and dimed" but it AIN'T knickles and dimes. My new ISP give me a media box with the option to record 4 streams and to use an on demand service. I explored it briefly. But 120 channels and NOTHING ON is all to true and the on demand stuff starts at 6 euro 49. I might be willing to pay for a single viewing of a movie that I cannot pause and watch another day. I might. BUT NOT AT WHAT USED TO BE FULL TICKET PRICES!
It is the horse armour problem. Betheseda ruined it with me forever by just charging to much. Had they charge half a dollar for it, everyone would have loved them. I use to pay 20 guilders, half the price of a full game for an X-Wing expansion and loved Lucasarts for taking my money. But that was a LOT of content. Horse armor was NOT a lot of content. Modders had done similar stuff, completely for FREE.
The internet and individual programs like napster changed the world, as much as the bicycle and the mailbox did. What did they change? With the bicycle poor people could extend their range for finding work considerably at little expensive. Charities used to donate them to women so they could find better paying jobs. Long before the car, and far cheaper then a horse, the bicycle allowed people to break themselves out of poverty and change the way they lived. No longer did you have to take any job you could find, you could look further.
The mail box freed women because now they could send letters without a chaperone, without asking a male to take them to the post office. It sounds silly in our days but it was a real liberator AND it was NOT intended to be so.
Does napster compare? Yes, I think so. It BROKE the music industries control over how we consume content. With Napster, bootleg tape sharing became trivial, getting just the one good song on an album became the norm. And with downloads, sales inflation to top the charts became a less useful because now people listened to their OWN music collections and those of others so they only listened to the songs they liked, not to the songs some DJ is payed to play.
I am not one of those persons who claims not to like the mindless drivel that is 99% of content these days. I like mindless drivel. I used to buy the TV-guide and circle the programs I wanted to watch and then plan my day around it. Lots of people did, popular show on, deserted streets. I USED to also listen to HALF of one LP, then half of the next because I had one of those LP stackers and that was the way things were and we humans wrapped our lifes around the limits of tech.
And then the Internet, digital content and piracy changed EVERYTHING.
I remember one friday evening at the office where we used napster to download old dutch songs and sing along with them. Songs that weren't on the radio anymore but we all remembered and could sing at the top of our voice. Had iTunes existed back then AND been usable in Holland (payment options still suck in iTunes even in 2013) it would have cost us 50 bucks or so... except I checked, the songs ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON ITUNES. Peter Blanker "Egeltje". Go ahead find it. eMule has it, usenet has it. Now take my money and get me a digital version of a tape MY MOTHER GOT FROM THE ARTIST HIMSELF FOR FREE BECAUSE I LIKED HIS SONGS! Still got the tape.
By now, there are services which indeed do offer some of the more obscure music. And that is great but... I have gotten so used to having to find stuff for free that going back to buying stuff with all the DRM, accounts and god knows what other hassles is like going back to using a horse for the daily commute. And I actually do ride a horse on occasion. It is lovely... but not practical.
Recently the BBC has started re-airing
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If offering links to illegally shared content is unlawful (not protected) speech, then how can it be used in enforcement? Without access to such speech would (c) enforcement be feasible?
The EHRC, like Blair's ICC, are both victor's courts- serving not justice but the will of the elites that rule Europe. For the Human Rights Court, it wasn't always this way. Teachers lost the 'right' to sexual abuse children under the disguise of 'corporal punishment' when two Scottish mothers took the UK to court because Scottish schools claimed the right to daily 'strap' a significant percentage of every child at school, and parents were denied an 'opt-out'.
More recently, the abusive collection of DNA records from ordinary innocent British citizens was declared illegal by the EHRC, but Tony Blair's puppets said they'd ignore the ruling anyway. Of late, the EHRC has justified the abuse of ordinary Muslims in Turkey, France and Italy. All three nations can abuse female Muslims by banning them from education and other State services if they wear a headscarf according to rulings from the EHRC.
Put in simple terms, if today you are worried about abusive behaviour by your national government, you are wasting your time seeking assistance at the EHRC if your government is currently on good terms with Blair, or his puppets running the UK. The irony is that Blair has his most extremist news agencies run campaigns against the Human Rights laws of post-war Europe, claiming such laws 'restrict' the British government. This riles up the dumber parts of the population- energy that Blair usefully channels into his various projects, like his holocaust in Syria.
The Pirate Bay peeps were concerned that their actions were not against the laws or constitution of their nation- and they are correct. Their appeal was NOT based on the idea that 'piracy' is OK, but that their actions were 'lawful'. The founders have clearly failed to notice that Europe has moved from a system of 'laws' to a system of 'influence wielded by the powerful'.
Europe is swinging very rapidly in Blair's direction- the authoritarian war-mongering right-wing direction previously associated with the pre-war fascists. Given the History of the 20th century, one might expect this fact would make people very nervous indeed, but there is no end to Human stupidity, when said Humans are subject to mass media brainwashing. So long as Blair is in favour of 'gay rights', well there can't be anything to worry about, surely? I mean, forget his genocide in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria- the guy wants 'gay marriage', and that's all that matters.
Blair removed the concept of 'intent' from the justice system, and replaced it with 'any form of loose association'. Young Muslims in Britain go to prison for long periods simply because of what they read. The Pirate Bay people get hit with this 'new reality' too. Interestingly, this idea was first sold to TV audiences in the USA, by shows about 'smart' lawyers/prosecutors who got their 'man' in court by radically reinterpreting some written law, and persuading a dumb jury to accept this. The public was brainwashed into thinking written laws were no longer to be seen as fixed- but clay to be remolded by people working for the government. When a law can mean anything the authorities want it to mean, we are screwed, but Hollywood carefully sold this abuse of procedure as a 'good thing' day after day on TV.
The actual body is the European Court of Human Rights, abbreviated ECtHR to distinguish it from the legislation that it enforces, the European Convention on Human Rights or ECHR.
Slashdot is rife with ambiguous initialisms, but if you can't even get them right you shouldn't use them.
And it should also be noted this court should not be confused with the European Court of Justice (ECJ). ECtHR is the court of the Council of Europe, ECJ is the court of the European Union. While the European Union main goal seems to destroy democracy and enforce neoliberalism, the Council of Europe has different goals. This is why we often see ECtHR ruling that look odd considering European Union politicis. Not this time, though.
is when you live in a place which holds "intellectual property" as a supreme law (c) by lehollandaisvolant