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Pirate Bay Founder Sentenced To Jail
An anonymous reader writes "Gottfrid Swartholm Warg — known also as Anakata — was on June 20th sentenced to two years imprisonment for data breaches and aggravated fraud by the District Court of Nacka in his native Sweden. It is unclear at this time wether the decision will be appealed to a higher court. Prison time in Sweden is generally served for two thirds of the time sentenced, if the person behaves well and the court finds no reason to abstain from the norm. Also, time spent in pre-trial confinement (swe: 'häkte') is deducted from the time sentenced. Warg was arrested in Cambodia in september of 2012, transferred to Sweden and ordered by court to remain in pre-trial confinement from September 14th, 2012."
2/3 of 2 years is 16 months. He's been held for 9 months already, so he has another 7 to go (until Jan 2014).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I find it amusing that while all this is going on, nobody is able to shut it down.
Which is great because that's where I like to search for my Linux ISO images.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
They're nicer than most low end motels/hotels in the states, its ridiculous!
He isn't going to jail for running TPB, but instead for doing something clearly illegal and just uncool in general. I don't see a problem with it.
The old lesson learned again: Don't go high profile and piss off the man if you have skeletons in your closet.
In London during the riots, a man was sentenced to six months jail for stealing a bottle of water.
However, the bankers crash the economy, cost taxpayers £130 billion pounds, threw millions out of work due to their negligence and criminality -- and NOONE has gone to jail. In America, the problem is made worse because it's actually Obama Administration policy to not prosecute bankers for fraud.
/usr/sbin/chroot /jail sleep 1892160000
This is a low blow from the establishment. Granted, Gottfrid comes off as a deranged, drug-addled terrorist occasionally, but he is at least partially responsible for the underpinnings of a true technological and cultural revolution. I am a security professional and as pissed as I get when some random asshole or DDOS (or me) brings down a datacenter of mine, I'm more upset with myself and my team for allowing that unsafe condition to exist in the first place. We have to be right all the time and they have to be right once. This is not a new concept. These companies and especially government organizations should be expected to assume the same level of due diligence, if not FAR more, than everyone else. They just had the sensitive data just sitting there to take. I'm not an anarchist and I believe completely in personal responsibility but there should be some comparative negligence that comes into play here. Yeah, sure, Gottfrid allegedly did it, but Logica and Nordea failed in protecting their customers' sensitive interests.
you cant destroy the pirate bay by simply arresting its founders, or any other torrent tracking system for that matter. its ludicrous.
the internet as a system and community enacts a sort of triage when this happens, and its geometrically faster than the litigation the **aa tends to favour.
One could argue rather convincingly that the advent of the magnet link was the downfall of the tradtional model of litigating peer-to-peer to death. Call me a cheerleader, but im sure Anakata understands that seven months of involuntary detention is no more an inconvenience than being roped into a particularly bad vodaphone contract.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I mean every message and statement on TPB is about freedom and such, but then they basically distribute access to copyrighted content. Freedom is not selective. People have a right to distribute content, but people also have a right to protect their content, period.
While you may not like copyright, its a law, and breaking the law is breaking the law.
I don't believe, however, that exposing links to protected material is the same as distributing copyright material. Going after TPB is the easy route, going after the millions of peers that actually have the protected content is impossible. Providing plans how to build a bomb is not the same as someone taking those plans and building a bomb with intent to use it, for instance.
However the the messaging of the TPB is watered down and idealistic. They want to be a mechanism to allow independents in music, video or other arts to have a mechanism to get content to the masses, which I wholeheartedly support, yet the primary and often only reason why people use TPB is to steal protected content. Why? Because its there.
TPB will not change the minds of billion dollar companies to remove copyright and freely distribute content, nor should they. If I spend $100 million to make a movie, and take the risk to release it, I expect a return on that investment and have the "freedom" to have the content protected. Just because its easy to steal digital content doesn't make it valid. If it was easy to steal cars it doesn't make it a valid argument that I should be allowed to steal cars then.
If TPB was serious about being a mechanism for content distribution for the "independent" then they should have changed their site long ago and blocked links to copyrighted content. I mean you can't be a champion for the independent when you don't respect people that also want to protect their investments.
The fight against DRM and copyright is NOT THE SAME as providing a resource for independent content distribution, nobody is blocking independent content distribution, just look at YouTube and Vimeo and Tumblr and Instagram and a slew of other social content channels.
TPB should switch to a streaming cloud service allowing independents to provide access to their content. Become the independent Netflix and Pandora and App or Game Store if they really believe in protecting the independent creator, but continuing to offer links to protected content and fighting for the rights of the independent is a mixed message and will only continue to cause them grief.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Hey, will someone fix the troll-bot? He's broken again!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --