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.'"

Comments

Oh noes!

[smooth wombat]

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!