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.'"
That's just the thing, they were not counterfeiting, they were linking to people who were. This puts Google in the same camp. You know, if they didn't have well funded corporate owned politicians.
What's so bizarre about it?
They basically said "corporate profits trump human rights." Not exactly Lewis Carol there.
At least it gives us Americans something to return fire with when Europeans start getting all smug about our thriving proto-fascism.
They are as nuanced as my statement would indicate. If the defamation is an untruth or a willful alteration of context meant(as in, literally "meant" as in the presence of mens rea) to cause literal, quantifiable harm to someone otherwise innocent of the accusation(s), I believe in the curbing of that instance of the defamer's freedom of expression in that case for the purpose of defending that person against that slander.
Again, this is my personal opinion on the matter.