Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Arrested In Sweden

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde's arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site's founders." From the article: "While details are scarce at the moment, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reports that the arrest has been confirmed by the Swedish authorities. According to Peter Althin, Sunde’s lawyer, the news means that his client will most likely be sent to prison to serve his 8-month sentence. Sunde’s prison sentence was made final in 2012 after Sweden’s Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running criminal case against the founders of The Pirate Bay."

Comments

His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

Or some trumped up charges that they can make stick? Running a site based on user content, ( remember they didn't house any files ) should not be considered a crime.

They really did nothing more than lets say, Slashdot..

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye. The thing is according to Swedish law TPB should be legal. I don't get how he could have been sentenced in the first place. I can only assume that Swedish courts are no longer independent and huge pressure was made from outside. Maybe by the content mafia.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[BitZtream]

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime. Google accidentally linking to some files is one thing. TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating copyright infringement. Thats different.

Google linking to information on how to make meth is one thing. Actively selling the chemicals to do so along with an instruction book detailing how to make meth and advertising yourself as the place to go for all your meth making needs is another.

Continuing to pretend they aren't intentionally facilitating copyright infringement just makes you seem stupid and/or dishonest at best. A flat out liar for any normal person.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Anonymous Coward]

Or some trumped up charges that they can make stick? Running a site based on user content, ( remember they didn't house any files ) should not be considered a crime.

They really did nothing more than lets say, Slashdot..

Did they? Slashdot links to news stories, provides shitty summaries and then cashes in on ad clicks. It matters what you link to. Slashdot does not exist to facilitate copyright infringement, the Pirate Bay did. Slashdot exists to allow techno geeks to piss and moan about (among other things) how unfair it is that content creators make life hard for the torrenting community because they feel pirating diminishes the compensation they get for their labour. If linking to files that enable people to download copyrighted stuff is what your site exists to do, and being a provider of the means to download those files counts as facilitation in your country then you are up shit creek without a paddle. You may disagree with those laws, you may find them unfair, and perhaps they are but as long as they are in effect you are still bloody screwed if you facilitate copyright infringement or any other illegal activity and are dumb enough to get caught. So if you can't do the time and don't like rough gay sex, successfully lobby your country's parliament to abolish copyrights before setting up a torrent site.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Frosty Piss]

I'm sure you will be modded into -1, but of course you are correct on this point.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Frosty Piss]

Aye. The thing is according to Swedish law TPB should be legal.

Apparently your understanding of Swedish law is as good as mine, which is absolutely none.

One assumes that if the man was convicted of a "crime" in Sweden, than what he did was against Swedish Law...

Re: His 'role in the site'

[click2005]

Yes, the innocent are never imprisoned for political reasons.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[cpghost]

Changing laws after the fact is always possible. Applying them retroactively is unconstitutional in most civilized countries. And even if Sweden is playing lapdog to Uncle Sam, I still don't believe they've sunk so low as to retroactively apply some laws there. At least, I hope they won't.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Shakrai]

Yes, the innocent are never imprisoned for political reasons.

Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were imprisoned for political reasons. This guy is being imprisoned because he helped to facilitate media piracy on a mass scale. You may disagree with that outcome but please don't try and paint him as some sort of oppressed political dissent.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Shakrai]

You cheapen the term "political prisoner" when you apply it to someone who goes to jail for something as mundane as piracy.

You may think it should be perfectly legal, or that it should be a civil matter (this is where I fall, FWIW) rather than a criminal one, but no matter what your opinion you do "the cause" a disservice when you conjure up images of Gandhi or Mandela, which is what comes to mind for most people when they hear "political prisoner".

Re:His 'role in the site'

[AK Marc]

So, what would you do with people that make The Anarchist Cookbook available? Jail? Or should we just burn the books, is that far enough?

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Shakrai]

If you split that hair any further you'll be looking at it on a subatomic level.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[blahplusplus]

"Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime."

The original crime was monopoly, Intellectual property and it's believers are the biggest scam going. The people who originally wrote copyright didn't expect it'd become eternal.

Look at the following chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

If you still think he's a "criminal" you are too stupid and illiterate to see that the law is nothing but the rich man's tool to take away the rights of everyone else.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Arker]

"One assumes that if the man was convicted of a "crime" in Sweden, than what he did was against Swedish Law..."

Except it was already pretty well established that what they were doing was perfectly legal under Swedish law and they had been operating quite openly for some time until Hollywood got real annoyed and DC phoned in threatened sanctions.

Then suddenly they had US-style SWAT raids on a bunch of geeks (this kind of treatment the Swedish Police do not typically resort to even when dealing with Russian Mafia) and a judge who ruled that it did not matter that what they actually *did* was legal, because their *intent* was not. Think about that for a second.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[bug1]

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime. Google accidentally linking to some files is one thing. TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating copyright infringement. Thats different.

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements, you lose all credibility when you act like all filesharing is copyright infringement. Accidental punishing legal sharing is one thing. Media cartels manipulating law enforcement agencies to deliberately target specific file sharing methods. Thats different.

TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating file sharing using the bittorrent protocol. It does not have the means to check copyrights, and media cartels have demonstrated they cannot be trusted to provide advise on what is copyrighted. They have no choice but to remove themselves from such decisions, just like google does.

Your implication that correlation implies causation is extremely dangerous to society, it can only lead us to a dark age of inquisitions and witch hunts.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[craigminah]

What if TPB was a website that linked people together to buy/sell crack, would that be ok? TPB facilitated crimes...even if you don't like copyright laws, without them we'd have a lot less quality stuff as incentives to produce would be diminished.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Arker]

"You cheapen the term "political prisoner" when you apply it to someone who goes to jail for something as mundane as piracy. "

There was no piracy involved or even alleged. He never raised a cutlass, boarded a skiff, or ravished a prisoner.

You unjustly honor the term 'pirate' when you apply it to someone whose crime was facilitating communication.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

Do you have any idea how stupid you sound when you make such statements. You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime. Google accidentally linking to some files is one thing. TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating copyright infringement. Thats different.

Do you have any idea how much of a fascist that makes you sound when you make such statements?

The simple fact is they were not facilitating. They offered a *public* blog, with content not under their control. Tho i may disagree with the premise, at least if you want to be consistent, you would go after the users that are actively sharing. Until then, its people discussing, which is free speech as far as i'm concerned.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[craigminah]

He was facilitating criminal activity...akin to me hosting a site that allowed drug dealers and drug users to meet. Though I sold no drugs I should be held liable, at least in part, for my actions that caused harm to the parties involved.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Raenex]

TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating file sharing using the bittorrent protocol. It does not have the means to check copyrights, and media cartels have demonstrated they cannot be trusted to provide advise on what is copyrighted. They have no choice but to remove themselves from such decisions, just like google does.

Get real here. The Pirate Bay explicitly set out to link to copyrighted materials.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[silas_moeckel]

They were not facilitating criminal activity they were facilitating something you could be civilly sued for in most civilized countries. They warped well your selling ads so your making money from it. The equivalent would be saying a newspaper who sells adds is criminally liable for prostitution because it has a personals section.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Shakrai]

to the point some say he advocated it

You said it, not me. The legal term you're looking for is facilitation. It's a crime in many jurisdictions.

I make no comment on whether or not it should be, or whether or not it should apply in this case. I just think it's absurd to apply the label "political prisoner" to Mr. Sunde.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Anonymous Coward]

If I have understood correctly, in (someparts of?) USA, if you drive the getaway car in a bank robbery and someone dies, you will be charged (and probably convicted) of murder. Although, in a way, what you did is nothing more than what a taxi driver does. Right?

Get real!

To be fair, the taxi driver is thinking that he's once again performing a serivce he performs several times daily with nothing going wrong and no crime associated. The taxi driver has an expectation that he's just selling a service like he does all the time to lots of non-criminals. If you told him you wanted his services specifically for a robbery and he still intentionally helped you then he would share your guilt for whatever happens.

I am no lawyer and this isn't legal advice. But I had the idea that you'd have to have helped plan the robbery for what you say to be true. If you really believed you were giving somebody a lift for a harmless purpose then what's your culpability if they deceive you by using your service to do something wrong that you could not have known about?

Re: His 'role in the site'

[bzipitidoo]

Piracy is a more important issue than most people realize. This isn't about just an obsolete business model of financing art via sales of copies, this is nothing less than the biggest thing that sets us apart from all other animals. We can talk to each other like no other animals can. Thousands of years ago, we figured out how to write. We used to have only drawings, paintings, and sculptures to communicate visual information, and nothing but memory for audio, now we have cameras, recorders, and more. But talking and writing and all these other methods are useless if we can't use it to communicate and share ideas and information with each other. Communication is absolutely necessary for civilization to exist. These slimy media owners want nothing less than to impose and collect a tax upon all communication.

He most certainly is a political prisoner.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[bug1]

Get real here. The Pirate Bay explicitly set out to link to copyrighted materials.

The piratebay administrators dont, some people who upload torrents do.

The site behaves the same way a "common carrier" does in tellecommunications, blaming TPB is like blaming ISP's for piracy.

ISP's want you to download content, they dont take any steps to verify the licences of content their customers are trying to download.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[BanHammor]

What did gay sex do to you that you equate rape to it? Seriously, that's just perpetuation of rape culture, don't do that.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is being imprisoned because he helped to facilitate media piracy on a mass scale.

Actually, the case was about a rather limited number of torrents: "Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, 9 to movies, and 4 to games.[2] One case involving music files was later dropped by the copyright holder who made the file available again on the website of The Pirate Bay"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial]

So, should the sentences and damages be scaled up by the total amount of infringing torrents on TPB / 33 ?

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Raenex]

Sorry, this is a bullshit argument. The administrators set out to create a site to assist in piracy, hence their name, hence their advertising that you can find TV shows, movies, etc on the site. It's not even a secret. You are either engaging in sophistry or are naive to claim they are a neutral "common carrier" status.

Since you are either playing dumb or otherwise, here it is, spelled out for you:

As befits an organization of global disrepute, Pirate Bay had its beginnings not in Scandinavia but in far-off Mexico City, where Gottfrid Svartholm was working, in 2003, for an Internet-security firm. As a devout member of Sweden's pro-piracy Web site Pirate Bureau, Svartholm agreed to use the security firm's servers to launch the Swedes' BitTorrent venture, and when he returned home the following year, he found a new accomplice in Fredrik Neij, a self-taught programmer who got his first job through a criminal act. "I hacked a company's service provider and put up obscene messages," says Neij. "The company said work for us or we prosecute." Asked why he committed the original act of vandalism, Neij responds brightly, "Because I could!"

By the time Neij got involved with Pirate Bay (there is a third, silent partner, named "Peter"), the site had effectively outgrown its host. "We had no idea it would happen," says Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Pirate Bureau. "It started off as just a little part of the site. Our forum was more important. Even the links were more important than the [torrent] tracker."

With a membership of more than 60,000, Pirate Bureau was originally devoted to the unofficial distribution of music files; expanded bandwidth enabled the transmission of video files. Fleischer neatly summarizes the ethos of his site: "We don't want to reform copyright lawâ"we just don't want the state to enforce it."

Fleischer likes to frame the copyright issue in historical and theoretical terms, expounding on ideas about "how value is produced in the cultural sector." He sees the notion of music copyright in particular as a transitory construct. "This has been the business model for some bit of the 20th century," he says. "Music has always worked in different economic ways, and copyright has only applied to a few genres historically."

Does that sound like a neutral ISP to you?

Re:His 'role in the site'

[amiga3D]

Watch out for the Hound!

Re:His 'role in the site'

[AnttiV]

Actively selling the chemicals to do so along with an instruction book detailing how to make meth and advertising yourself as the place to go for all your meth making needs is another.

While we are addressing details, I'd correct that to:

Actively giving and address to a shop that sells the chemicals (selling the chemicals) to do so along with a name and a phone number for a guy who will give you and instruction book (an instruction book) detailing how to make meth and advertising yourself as the place to go for all your meth making needs is another.

(originals in parenthesis).

I repeat myself, but: piratebay DOES NOT (nor did ever) host the actual "material", just a means to get it. It's not exactly like "links on Google" (because -torrent files contain much more than just a hyperlink), but it IS far less than actually hosting the material.

I don't say he didn't advocate piracy (he probably did), but he did not, in fact, actually host any of the actual data.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[dbIII]

TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating copyright infringement

Which should be a civil matter instead of SWAT team through the window criminal. The reason for the overwhelming force is political, and before that, extensive lobbying (complicated bribery) which turned something that was previously a civil dispute dealt with by coporation funded lawyers into something police forces could waste taxpayer money on. What makes it even more astonishing is that it went international.
It still amazes me that anyone can go to jail for something like this that poses no danger to the people around them. Anything more than a fine is wasting taxpayers money to help out donors IMHO.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[dbIII]

I'd say jail but only because I'm almost of the opinion that it was a hare-brained 1970s CIA scheme designed to blow dumb potential bombers up and supply misinformation for the rest.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[serviscope_minor]

You cheapen the term "political prisoner" when you apply it to someone who goes to jail for something as mundane as piracy.

No, political prisoner has a specific meaning. Some end up very famous and did great things. Others not so much. Without comenting on whether this chap is a political prisoner, you do a great disservice to those unfortunates imprisoned for political reasons when you disiss them as not political prisoners because they're not as good as Gandhi.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[serviscope_minor]

If you still think he's a "criminal" you are too stupid and illiterate to see that the law is nothing but the rich man's tool to take away the rights of everyone else.

A criminal is merely someone who has comitted a crime. If you do something illegal that makes you a criminal, no matter how stupid the law. The flip side of that is that doing something illegal is not necessarily immoral or unjustified.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jones_supa]

The site behaves the same way a "common carrier" does in tellecommunications, blaming TPB is like blaming ISP's for piracy.

Why are we even going through this discussion? Even the site's name and the legal threats page makes it very clear that they are full on about piracy and that they laugh on copyright holders.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jones_supa]

If TPB was storing said 'infringing' files, then we could have a discussion about their legal status in the matter. But they were not, so we wont.

The torrents are essentially a means to "virtualize" the contained files, so in practice they do control access to the content. How could you download any of that material without the torrrents?

Re: His 'role in the site'

[munch117]

Using 'piracy' to describe copyright infringement is hacker's jargon that moved into the mainstream. In the 1980's, the word was mostly used to describe software copying. The jargon use of the word is older than that though; describing a radio station without a license to use the spectrum as a pirate radio goes back to at least the 1950's.

You unjustly honor the term 'pirate' when you apply it to someone whose crime was facilitating communication.

Tell that to Piratpartiet.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

So content creators are stealing from themselves? Is that theft? That's too funny.

What's the rationale for a finite copyright period? What would happen if copyrights were extended to infinite years? Unlike patents, copyrights don't prevent others from creating new creative works.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

No, you shouldn't.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[bug1]

Being an advocate of a crime is not the same thing as being an accessory to a crime.

I know its easy to make things black and white, but everyone who has followed it should be able to understand they go out of their way to make it as grey as possible. If it was black and white it would have been delt with long ago.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Raenex]

I know its easy to make things black and white, but everyone who has followed it should be able to understand they go out of their way to make it as grey as possible.

Whatever. Your defense of ISP "common carrier" status are bunk. There's nothing gray about their intentions to support file sharing of copyrighted works, and they explicitly did not hide that fact -- quite the opposite. The only gray issue was if they were operating within the law regardless, because they never hosted copyrighted works. That has been their defense the whole time.

Get a clue and stop spouting bullshit.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[bug1]

If you cant see both sides of an argument it suggests bias, not wisdom.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Raenex]

It's not about seeing both sides, it's about seeing what is there. If you can't acknowledge the basic facts, the bias is on your side. If you wanted to make an argument that they were operating legally because of linking, regardless of their obvious intent to allow sharing of copyrighted files, you'd at least have an argument based in reality.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[cheesybagel]

Gandhi made salt on a beach with his own hands as a form of insubordination against the salt tax in India and encouraged other to do the same remember?

Re:His 'role in the site'

[dnaumov]

Ah, yes, and gun manufacturers and distributors facilitate murder, right?

Re:His 'role in the site'

[ultranova]

You lose all credibility when you act like facilitating crime isn't in and of itself a crime.

Does helping an old woman cross a street make you a criminal on the grounds that you are facilitating jaywalking?

Law exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Copyright law has long ago abandoned this mission, and in doing so lost moral authority. Thus people who break it are not criminals, and neither are people who facilitate this.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[amanaplanacanalpanam]

You unjustly honor the term 'pirate' when you apply it to someone whose crime was facilitating communication.

(And on that euphemistic note...)

I'll have you know real actual piracy is quite the honorable career. What nobler pursuit than redistribution of wealth? Even most current governments know this.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[SuricouRaven]

Internet copyright infringement is a criminal activity in the US, at least. Has been since the NET act - it actually makes infringement for commercial purposes a criminal offense, but defines that in such a broad sense that torrenting is included. If you copy a work with an expectation of receiving more infringing works in return, that's considered commercial. I imagine some other countries have similar laws.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[SuricouRaven]

Magnet links.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[BitZtream]

TPB exists entirely on the premise of facilitating file sharing using the bittorrent protocol.

If you actually believe that is the only reason, and that copyright infringement wasn't intentional, you're a moron.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[BitZtream]

Being an advocate of a crime is not the same thing as being an accessory to a crime.

No it isn't, but TPB's founders were both.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[BitZtream]

Depends on the purpose.

Manufacturing and distributing guns with the intent of sport, hunting or even self defense, then no. Just like promoting sharing Linux ISOs via bit torrent isn't facilitating infringement.

However Smith & Wesson coming out with a new ad campaign targeting selling untraceable guns and ammo to known murderers would.

Even military contractors at least in theory are selling weapons to allow posturing in such a way that prevents wars (I won't try very hard to argue that one though cause its probably not true).

I understand your point, but hiding behind the good examples of usage while you intentionally make every effort possible to promote the bad uses makes it a different ball game entirely.

Hell, look at the name. Look at how they would brag about ignoring C&D letters and hide behind Swedish law to do so.

I'm not a copyright Nazi. When I was younger, I certainly frequented TPB, but I had no delusions about what I was doing there. Now I'm a gainfully employed (actually I'm not at the moment, but thats another story :/) software developer, so I have a different perspective on the issue.

I don't actually have a problem with kids who don't have a bunch of money to blow on games occasionally pirating a AAA title or copy of the latest Windows/OSX or my software. I do have a problem with making piracy easy for the masses so that everyone can do it with no effort so that it becomes easier for those who are ABLE to pay a fair price don't do so. I spent my time on IRC running bots, and I still have no problem with DCC serves to some extent, but in no way is something like Napster OK since it meant Grandma suddenly could get any and EVERY song she wanted without any contribution what so ever, and worse still it promoted the idea of not paying those who did the work.

No, its not okay to put the single mom of 3 in jail or fine her hundreds of thousands of dollars because her son wanted to listen to the latest eminem song that she was NEVER going to buy because she had enough of a hard time feeding him in the first place, but it is equally not okay to teach him/her that its okay to steal that work.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[ZoobieWa]

How can you prove the intent of the organization? They do not necessarily, as you say, "exist entirely on the premise of facilitating copyright infringement." That is your interpretation, and one that's extremely difficult to prove in court. Nothing like that is ever explicitly stated. This puts you in the credibility realm of the mind reader.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

...its free speech.

Free speech only applies to speech created by yourself. It's not an excuse to obtain other people's works without payment.

If TPB was storing said 'infringing' files, then we could have a discussion about their legal status in the matter. But they were not, so we wont.

Stranger C copies a digital product from stranger S. C has not paid for the product so he's committing copyright infringement (so is S). The only way C knows S has the files he wants is through TPB. Just as you can't read a file on your hard disk without knowing its full/relative path name, C can't obtain the files without knowing where they are stored. So advertising and providing the location of copyrighted files, is likely or should be considered a copyright infringement crime -- this needs be in the laws.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[ZoobieWa]

You really think it should be illegal to print a book on how to make meth? That goes against so much of freedom of speech and brings you into the realm of book burning. What about a book on how to kill people? What about texts on how to defend yourself? You are far beyond the slippery slope, but it does give an indication into your mentality. By the way, this would make any chemistry textbook and course quite illegal.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

Free speech only applies to speech created by yourself. It's not an excuse to obtain other people's works without payment.

Without getting into the moral angle of right and wrong of IP and how stupid your 'in the laws' suggestion is, TPB operators were not doing this anyway, their USERS were. ( well, i guess they most likely were doing it behind the sends to be realistic, but that isn't the reason for the charges so its not relevant in the discussion )

And since you are most likely a idiot, ill repeat myself, yet again: TPB operators are not responsible for their user's content.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

TPB operators were not doing this anyway, their USERS were.

Reread my previous comment a few times then. Without knowing where the files are, the users can't copy anything. This site is actively enabling copyright infringement. The TPB owners know what's going on -- heck 99% of the site is links to pirated digital goods. The whole purpose of the site is to enable piracy and they do it like a bunch of of evil geniuses -- they don't host the pirated data. So according to the (current) laws, they have not committed a crime. That's why the laws need to be updated.

And since you are most likely a idiot, ill repeat myself, yet again: TPB operators are not responsible for their user's content.

Sure they are if their whole site and the bittorrent protocol is designed to only pirate stuff. There is very little non-copyrighted content that is worth downloading because creating anything anyone cares about takes years and years of effort and no one does that for free. Only greedy, evil idiots like yourself want everything to be free -- to not compensate the people creating stuff for you.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[CrimsonAvenger]

Having read the Anarchist Cookbook back in the day, a word of advice:

Do NOT attempt those recipes. They're dangerous as hell to anyone who isn't already a trained chemist (and anyone who IS a trained chemist doesn't need the Anarchist Cookbook to make things that go boom).

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

Compared to the original idea of copyright (about 7 years), it means that unlike other craftrsmen, artists, musicians etc. are free to decide they are making money at a high enough rate, and stop working

The 7 years rule seems completely arbitrary and the original crafters of copyright laws probably underestimated how useful and in-demand copyrighted materials would become.

resulting in the majority of content being produced by incompetent new-comers and one-hit wonders, while the experienced and actually skilled people stop producing.

I don't think forcing people to work is good for producing creative works and besides, successful artists spend years, even decades creating new works.

It seems quite unfair that some people seem to hold infinite time rights to enjoy and profit from their stuff, like real estate ownership, the right to collect taxes, etc. whereas artists lose control over stuff they created themselves, not borrowed from nature. I think this is theft, by use of law -- the ruling class stealing from the creative class.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

Are you really that dense where you cant conceptually separate the operators of a PUBLIC site to the USERS that post items? Regardless of any feelings about the ludicrousness of IP in the first place, the USERS are the violators, not the site operators, ( or anyone else that happens to be in the chain, like the ISPs, routers and computer manufacturers, the OS providers, the writers of the torrent client .. ).

The only exception to this rule that i would entertain would be 'private' sites which require you to share 'warez' to even have an account.. TPB does not require this.

We are done here, i'm tired of talking to a box of bricks for brains. People like you waste the earth's resources for the rest of us.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

Regardless of any feelings about the ludicrousness of IP in the first place, the USERS are the violators, not the site operators,

Read this entire slashdot thread: TBP was created by pirates and hackers based in new mexico. If you removed all the pirated content from TBP, the site would die a quick death as it has no other purpose as I explained in my previous post. You call me dense but fail to address even a single concern in my previous post. My every point that's against your argument is conveniently ignored. So what's the point of debating?

( or anyone else that happens to be in the chain, like the ISPs, routers and computer manufacturers, the OS providers, .. ).

Those things have legitimate uses and its sellers are not actively involved in enabling piracy, unlike TPB. TPB and its protocol were explicity designed to circumvent current copyright laws. Can you say the same about these products you complain about? You sound like a hardcore pirate. Let me repeat this so it can enter your thick skull: There is very little non-copyrighted content that is worth downloading. If certain content is valuable and free, there are tons of sites providing it for free or a fee, so there's no need for TBP other than exchanging pirated content.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[nurb432]

We are done here, i'm tired of talking to a box of bricks for brains. People like you waste the earth's resources for the rest of us.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[bug1]

The uneducated masses just look at the end result, they see a site that makes it easy to get copyright infringing material, and they blame the site. A simplistic analysis and little value. Try digging a bit deeper.

The law should judge people based on their actions, not on their beliefs. TPB adminstrators have gone out of the way to setup the systems so their actions are not contributing to copyright infringment.

If they can setup a system so they can advocate their views without being accessories then i think that is a good form of civil disobedience. Societies cant progress if people blindly do what they are told.

It could be argued their inaction is contibuting to copyright infringment, but ive not heard the argument about that being illegal.

The fact that you resort to personal attacks say more about your values that it does about me, so grow up.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

Those are passive enablers of piracy. By that logic, everything a pirate uses is responsible for piracy, including food, water, books, schools, hospitals, tables, chairs, houses. Take any of these away, and piracy will die or be seriously impaired.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[silas_moeckel]

I said civilized, US copyright law is anything but.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

Free speech only applies to speech created by yourself.

That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Were that true, it would be constitutional for the government to punish people for holding up signs made and given to them by others. If that happens, then you have tyranny.

It's not an excuse to obtain other people's works without payment.

If your society treats government-enforced monopolies over ideas as more important than free speech, your society is diseased. Almost every country in the world is afflicted with a very serious disease.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[Raenex]

The uneducated masses just look at the end result, they see a site that makes it easy to get copyright infringing material, and they blame the site. A simplistic analysis and little value. Try digging a bit deeper.

Try making arguments based in reality and not on your flawed assumptions that you refuse to budge from, despite the facts being in plain sight and pointed out to you.

TPB adminstrators have gone out of the way to setup the systems so their actions are not contributing to copyright infringment.

This is complete bullshit. They advertise as a pirate site. They have a link on their front page to TV shows. In their About page, their only concern is that the content should match the description:

"The Pirate Bay only removes torrents if the name isn't in accordance with the content. One must know what is being downloaded.

(accordance with the content also means any torrents which description is made to match a certain search phrase that is not relevant will also be deleted)

Only torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker. Any complaints from copyright and/or lobby organizations will be ridiculed and published at the site."

That's their argument, not your stupid "oh gee, we dunno, maybe their is copyrightable material being linked to, maybe not, herp derp, we are just a common carrier".

The fact that you resort to personal attacks say more about your values that it does about me, so grow up.

It says I'm frustrated by somebody playing dumb. At least for your sake I hope you are just playing dumb and don't actually believe your own stupid statements, which are in complete contradiction with reality.

Now if you excuse me, I'm tired of repeating myself and responding to willful ignorance.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[bug1]

It says I'm frustrated by somebody playing dumb. At least for your sake I hope you are just playing dumb and don't actually believe your own stupid statements

We dont have to agree, its ok for people to have differences of opinion. No big deal.

I dont accept your arguments that they are accessories to copyright infringement (assuming thats a law); From wikipedia

An accessory is a person who assists in the commission of a crime, but who does not actually participate in the commission of the crime as a joint principal. The distinction between an accessory and a principal is a question of fact and degree:

        The principal is the one whose acts or omissions, accompanied by the relevant mens rea (Latin for "guilty mind"), are the most immediate cause of the actus reus (Latin for "guilty act").
        If two or more people are directly responsible for the actus reus, they can be charged as joint principals (see common purpose). The test to distinguish a joint principal from an accessory is whether the defendant independently contributed to causing the actus reus rather than merely giving generalised and/or limited help and encouragement.

IMO It is reasonable to expect the site administrators to know that there is copyright infringing material on their site. But it is not reasonable to expect the site administrators to know if downloading material from a specific torrent would constitute a copyright infringing. Nothing you have said about the words they use or the way they organise their links has any bearing on that.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[Xest]

It's not necessarily the case that when someone is convicted of something, that they actually did something illegal in practice.

Otherwise there'd be no such concept of a mistrial. You wouldn't have say, a 4% rate of innocents getting killed on death row. Just because someone has been convicted something does not inherently mean they did something illegal.

In this particular case the judge was a member of a music industry lobby group. In any sane legal jurisdiction the case would've been thrown out on this as a clear conflict of interest whether or not the judge actually let that sway his decision or not. It wasn't however because of the apparent corruption in the Swedish legal system. The fact this didn't happen suggests there's a very high chance that these guys did indeed do nothing illegal, but the powers that be wanted them convicted of something regardless.

You only have to look at the nonsense surrounding the Assange case "Oh we can't interview in a foreign country (even though we've done exactly that before), he just has to come here!" to see that the Swedish justice system has been subverted by American interests.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[dave420]

Well, you're not painting the whole picture, be it on accident or by purpose. It wasn't a "blog" they created, but a directory of user-uploaded files. These files are arranged in their directory by type, including "TV Shows", "Movies", "Windows Games", etc. They provided no mechanism to deal with allegations of copyright infringement hosted by their site, and went even further by publicly haranguing legal firms which requested the take-down of such infringing material. Clearly the content is under their control, as they host it. That is clearly facilitating, by definition. I'm a big supporter of TPB, but I don't believe in lying to make a point, as the only point that is made in such cases is that you are a liar.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[dave420]

There is no such thing as a public blog, as a blog is:

"a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis."

So you might want to try being a bit more accurate with the words you pick, and try not to leave out the mountains of evidence that not only did they know what TPB was being used for, that they actively encouraged it.

Again, for the record, I am a huge TPB supporter, but we can't get anywhere if people simply make stuff up to support their position. Like you are doing. Frequently.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

If your society treats government-enforced monopolies over ideas as more important than free speech, your society is diseased. Almost every country in the world is afflicted with a very serious disease.

It's not just an enforced monopoly, it's protection against freeloading looters who, without the law around, will smash store windows and steal stuff without paying. What serious disease are you talking about? The disease of wanting to get paid for ones work?

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jhol13]

"taxi driver is thinking"

This is exactly my point. And you missed it.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[david_thornley]

They are, of course. Typically, they are either "disappeared" or held without charges or they are wrongly convicted of an actual crime. If somebody is convicted of a crime that's very strong evidence that there is a law against what that person was alleged to have done.

Re: His 'role in the site'

[david_thornley]

Actually, "piracy" to describe copyright infringement goes way back. Any use as hacker's jargon was almost certainly derived from the current use. (It could have been independent, but linking two concepts that disparate seems unlikely to have happened twice.)

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

It's not just an enforced monopoly, it's protection against freeloading looters

Copyright infringement is not legally considered stealing.

who, without the law around, will smash store windows and steal stuff without paying.

Not sure what that has to do with copyright. Are you parodying copyright trolls?

The disease of wanting to get paid for ones work?

Wanting to get paid for your work is fine, but only if you can find a way to make money in the free market, which is free from government enforced monopolies over ideas that promote censorship and prevent people from using their own resources to duplicate non-private (as in, nothing to do with privacy) resources.

You seem to think that people should be handed little monopolies for their specific ideas, while I disagree. What I say literally has nothing to do with insulting people for wanting to get paid. How they try to make money is what is relevant to me, as their means to that end can be moral or immoral depending on what they try to do.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

Copyright infringement is not legally considered stealing.

Sure, it is: article, fbi. It's almost like shoplifting but at a higher level. The only difference between a physical and intangible product is the duplication cost, which should not make one product payable and the other free. If you derive benefit from someone's work, whether it's tangible or intangible, you have to pay their selling price, otherwise it's stealing. I will admit that piracy has some benefit: it forces manufacturers to lower their prices in some cases, and prevents price gouging.

You seem to think that people should be handed little monopolies for their specific ideas, while I disagree.

The only thing that protects ideas are patents, not copyrights, and even patents don't technically protect ideas: they only protect apparatus or method for an invention. Using words like monopolies is completely wrong in the context of copyrights. I may have a copyright on a book that contains a sentence: The black grasshopper bounced around the lawn. Well, you infringe my copyright if you copy that book, and that sentence, word for word. But you can get around the copyright by rephrasing that sentence as: The lawn was filled with hopping grasshoppers. See, there's no monopoly of ideas, and that's how movies copy little ideas from other movies or books.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

Sure, it is

The first article is just an opinion from someone much like yourself, while the second link is a propaganda piece that only applies in very limited scenarios to begin with. You have not shown that copyright infringement is legally (i.e. by the courts) considered theft. Government agencies can say whatever they want.

If you derive benefit from someone's work, whether it's tangible or intangible, you have to pay their selling price, otherwise it's stealing.

It's copyright infringement.

No, wait, it's actually rape. Copyright infringement is rape. Meanings are irrelevant; whether or not a certain use of a term causes confusion is irrelevant. All that matters is that you're as inflammatory as possible. You remind me of the "for the children" crowd who blow everything out of proportion and use inflammatory language and 'logic' to get everyone to agree with them.

Because you see, when you say "stealing," I have no idea if you're equating copyright infringement to actual theft (i.e. someone stole a TV) or using that stupid common definition ("You stole my idea!"). I've seen examples of both. It also doesn't help that people who don't understand copyright might very well become confused when such incorrect terminology is used.

The only thing that protects ideas are patents, not copyrights, and even patents don't technically protect ideas: they only protect apparatus or method for an invention.

Yes.

Using words like monopolies is completely wrong in the context of copyrights.

Since linking to random articles written by people you agree with is acceptable to you, you may find this acceptable.

It is not "completely wrong"; you have a monopoly over something very specific, but that doesn't mean it's not a monopoly.

I will hereby refer to all copyright proponents as child molesters. For dramatic effect, of course.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

The first article is just an opinion from someone much like yourself, while the second link is a propaganda piece that only applies in very limited scenarios to begin with. You have not shown that copyright infringement is legally (i.e. by the courts) considered theft. Government agencies can say whatever they want.

By the way, we are talking about copyright infringement in general. Don't confuse "Copyright infringement is theft." with "Copyright infringement is legally considered a certain form of theft in certain situations." They differ.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

It is not "completely wrong"; you have a monopoly over something very specific, but that doesn't mean it's not a monopoly.

So why are you complaining then? Since it's very specific, you can work around it easily. It's like having a monopoly over fingerprints, very easily avoided, you just need to submit a different set of fingerprints from the author of copyrighted works. But I guess you can't because you're not talented and have no skill, or money required to create anything of value.

I will hereby refer to all copyright proponents as child molesters. For dramatic effect, of course.

LOL, you should walk into walmart, take one of their DVDs and pay them a dollar for the physical DVD but not for the files inside, (since intellectual property is worthless according to you), and if they demand the retail price, call them child molesters and rapists.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

So why are you complaining then?

Because, as we've seen, copyright enforcement leads to censorship and the loss of real private property rights. Censorship is the biggest issue for me; I find it 100% intolerable.

But I guess you can't because you're not talented and have no skill, or money required to create anything of value.

Interesting how you make such statements about someone you don't know. I'm a software developer, and I wouldn't make money if I didn't create anything of value. Do you just want it to be true? "You're not a 'creator'!" is either a logical fallacy or just an irrelevancy, depending on what was meant.

Are you copyright proponents too talentless and lazy to create anything of value and successfully market it in a world that had a real free market? By the way, since that would be similar to the idiotic thing you said above, that question is not serious.

LOL, you should walk into walmart, take one of their DVDs and pay them a dollar for the physical DVD but not for the files inside, (since intellectual property is worthless according to you), and if they demand the retail price

That's physical property.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

So why are you complaining then?

Because, as we've seen, copyright enforcement leads to censorship and the loss of real private property rights. Censorship is the biggest issue for me; I find it 100% intolerable.

This is like debating with a child. It's not your property. You paid $10 to $50 for a movie dvd that cost between $50 million and $500 million to create. Again, you don't own the movie, just one copy of it for your personal (and family) use only. If you distribute it to others, the sellers would suffer financially from loss of income. If you like sticking it to people who give you stuff, you're just a selfish person.

Interesting how you make such statements about someone you don't know. I'm a software developer, and I wouldn't make money if I didn't create anything of value. Do you just want it to be true? "You're not a 'creator'!" is either a logical fallacy or just an irrelevancy, depending on what was meant.

I'm betting your software gets used in-house only at your company, which probably does not rely on software copyrights for generating revenue.

LOL, you should walk into walmart, take one of their DVDs and pay them a dollar for the physical DVD but not for the files inside, (since intellectual property is worthless according to you), and if they demand the retail price

That's physical property.

No, the physical property is cheap plastic costing between 10 and 50 cents. The IP containing files stored on that are the reason it costs $10.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

This is like debating with a child.

It's like debating with someone who is in vehement disagreement with certain laws and traditions.

It's not your property.

Whatever it is stored on is your own property. You generally use your own property to transmit the information, as well. Other people use their own property to receive the information. It's all quite voluntary, and this would be the natural state of things if it were not for censorship and anti-private property laws.

But mere laws cannot stop something that seems so natural in the age of information, as well as something that is so simple to do.

the sellers would suffer financially from loss of income.

There is a difference between not gaining and losing.

If you like sticking it to people who give you stuff, you're just a selfish person.

Fortunately, it has nothing to do with sticking it to anyone. That seems futile. It would be like downloading a movie thousands of times and expecting each download to hurt the MPAA; nonsensical.

No, the physical property is cheap plastic costing between 10 and 50 cents. The IP containing files stored on that are the reason it costs $10.

That's irrelevant. In order to have permission to leave the store with the physical property, you need to pay them what they're asking for, since it's their physical property and they set the terms and conditions. They could charge three times the normal asking price for something just because they like whatever it is; it makes no difference why.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

Whatever it is stored on is your own property. You generally use your own property to transmit the information, as well. Other people use their own property to receive the information. It's all quite voluntary, and this would be the natural state of things if it were not for censorship and anti-private property laws.

It's your own property with a lot of restrictions -- one of the main ones being no redistribution. If don't agree with the restrictions, don't buy it, no one is forcing you. Only the copyright holder can sell to multiple people to recoup his cost and get extra for profit.

Explain how you can own something that cost $100 million to make by paying $15. This is like a renter paying $1000/mo. for a $250K house and claiming its his own house since he paid for it. Just like the renter can't sell the house he's renting, you can't redistribute copyrighted files.

the sellers would suffer financially from loss of income.

There is a difference between not gaining and losing.

In this case, they are strongly related.

No, the physical property is cheap plastic costing between 10 and 50 cents. The IP containing files stored on that are the reason it costs $10.

That's irrelevant.

No, you're a weasel. There are only three parts of any store bought $14.99 DVD: a case ($1 or $2 tops), 10 cent disc, files that form the movie. You're paying over $10 for the files.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

It's your own property with a lot of restrictions -- one of the main ones being no redistribution.

Yes, that's kind of the point.

If don't agree with the restrictions, don't buy it, no one is forcing you.

Sadly, copyright uses censorship as an enforcement method and restricts private property rights, which is true regardless of whether or not anyone uses anything. That's pretty much the only way to enforce it. That, to me, is unacceptable, regardless of how many products I choose not to buy or use.

I do not go in airports, and yet I am 100% opposed to the TSA. Something need not be mandatory for me to oppose it. And realistically, avoiding all copyrighted products is nigh impossible.

Explain how you can own something that cost $100 million to make by paying $15.

Very easily. By having copies of the data on equipment that you own. How much money it took to arrange the data is irrelevant, as those are costs they chose to incur upon themselves.

How can it be that you own the computer, as well as all the storage equipment, yet certain data on the storage equipment somehow 'belongs' to someone else, and censorship will be employed as a method of stopping you from transmitting that data to others using the equipment you bought?

In this case, they are strongly related.

Really?

No, you're a weasel.

The point is, the data is stored on the physical storage medium. Why they're charging what they do is irrelevant, because it's their property and they decide the conditions which you must satisfy in order for them to give it to you.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[gnupun]

Yes, that's kind of the point.

You have the freedom to listen/watch it as many times you want. Why do you think you deserve more for a lousy $15? It seems your freedoms are being violated here.

Explain how you can own something that cost $100 million to make by paying $15.

Very easily. By having copies of the data on equipment that you own. How much money it took to arrange the data is irrelevant, as those are costs they chose to incur upon themselves.

You don't own the data, you only have copy of it -- there's a big difference between owning and having access to something. Just because you sit in a car does not mean you own it, although you have access to it.

According to your rules of possession, since you have access to the source code of your company's product, would it be completely okay for you to share that code with someone for a fee, or copy it to a Internet repository for free?

So the creators have a right to make only $15 from a $100 million expense? People like you are the very reason copyright exists in the first place,

Sadly, copyright uses censorship as an enforcement method and restricts private property rights,

Wrong, censorship means access is so restricted that it's very difficult for anyone to obtain the movie. When you can buy it at any store, it's not censored. Stop redefining words.

You pirates keep coming up with the lamest and flimsiest excuses by twisting the meaning of commonly used words for things they were not intended for -- free speech, ownership of property, censorship.

Re:His 'role in the site'

[jelIomizer]

Why do you think you deserve more for a lousy $15?

I don't expect the ones I bought the product from to do anything more; you're misunderstanding something. They don't have to do a thing.

You don't own the data, you only have copy of it

Under current law, yes.

Just because you sit in a car does not mean you own it, although you have access to it.

In that case, you don't actually own the car. That would be closer to renting a DVD or something.

In this case, you do own the storage media.

According to your rules of possession, since you have access to the source code of your company's product, would it be completely okay for you to share that code with someone for a fee, or copy it to a Internet repository for free?

That really depends on whose equipment it is stored on. But if I have it, then yes.

So the creators have a right to make only $15 from a $100 million expense?

The creators have a right to try to make as much money as they want. The same as anyone else. They just don't get to do it through the use of government enforced monopolies that utilize censorship and suppress real private property rights. Instead, they should have to deal in the actual free market, and find new and innovative ideas to make money.

Wrong, censorship means access is so restricted that it's very difficult for anyone to obtain the movie.

Incorrect. Censorship takes many forms. Taking down a website is called censorship even if the information can be gotten elsewhere. If the information had to disappear close to 100%, then censorship literally would not exist in any form and the entire term would be pointless. Censorship is just the suppression of certain speech or data; it doesn't have to be effective. We see this all the time with people opposing mandatory Internet filters and calling it censorship. They're ineffective, yet it's still censorship.

You pirates keep coming up with the lamest and flimsiest excuses by twisting the meaning of commonly used words for things they were not intended for -- free speech, ownership of property, censorship.

Free speech, censorship, and private property rights are all at play here. And I don't think you're one to decide what they were "intended for." How that's even relevant, I don't know.

And nothing changes...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're wasting their time. TPB hasn't even been taken down yet, and even if it was, users would just flock to the many, many other similar sites that exist. The copyright fools have lost this war in practice.

Re:And nothing changes...

[fustakrakich]

The copyright fools have lost this war in practice.

Um, maybe you should check the box office numbers before saying things like that. The laws are still on the books, and people are still going to jail, for what is supposed to be a civil matter. Criminal and civil law have become one in the same. To bad all the submissive fools who vote don't care.

Re:And nothing changes...

[jelIomizer]

Even if they did vote, would they vote based on these issues, or based on 'hot topics' like abortion and gay marriage? In the US, with our two party system, I don't see this copyright nonsense changing anytime soon, because people are too easily distracted by more popular issues, so they keep voting for 'the lesser of two evils' and nothing changes.

But I think what was meant was that since they cannot effectively stop any of this by any means, they have lost in that way.

8 months in a Swedish prison

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like a vacation to me.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[rogoshen1]

Well, compared to what he'd get if he was in the US (more than likely multiple life sentences or multi-million dollar fines); 8 months is indeed a vacation.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[cpghost]

Who says he won't be extradited to the US later?

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[AK Marc]

Or they can send him to the US to serve the sentence, concurrent with his trial in the US.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[houghi]

And evenn if they said it. They have 8 months to change their mind and change the law to give them the right to do so if need be.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[amiga3D]

Compared to life in the cesspools that pass for prisons I'd consider the death penalty a better option.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[jones_supa]

8 months in a Swedish prison sounds like a vacation to me.

At least it is somewhat reasonable punishment (hey, he didn't kill anyone), rather than 100 years in jail and a zillion dollar fine. 8 months should still be a nice snap on the fingers.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[amiga3D]

Know of one?

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[BitZtream]

Sweden doesn't work that way. Like most countries, Sweden has to agree to some extent with the crime/punishment before they'll let you ship you off.

Re:8 months in a Swedish prison

[dave420]

Most of the western world is better than the plea-bargain-three-strikes-old-sparky nonsense the US is currently engaged in.

That's not true and you know it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop playing semantic games. "Data" is a highly abstract and generalized categorization of things that, for every practical difference, are worlds apart.

An anonymous posting on a blog is *not the same thing* as a musical piece that required a lot of talent and upfront costs to produce. Though both can be stored as data, they are as different as night and day.

The level of control asserted over data, by the wealthy entrenched powers, is precisely the level of control that the unwashed masses choose to abide. If enough people really and truly believed that information should be free, the amount of political and economic force they could bring to bear (with relatively little effort) would change the laws and the balance of power.

Individual acts of defiance might get some media attention, but that is about it. You can't change the system that way. You can change the system through, and only through, large groups of people that agree with you.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If the normal number hypothesis holds for Pi, doesn't it mean that there are all the Metallica songs in MP3 somewhere in it? ;-)

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[stephenmac7]

What is the normal number hypothesis?

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[ifiwereasculptor]

An anonymous posting on a blog is *not the same thing* as a musical piece that required a lot of talent and upfront costs to produce.

Now why would that be? You're probably inferring that the anonymous posting has no value or hasn't been worked on. But an anonymous posting can be as valuable as music. If you take Slashdot's own sort of news, that's pretty interesting. It amounts to a curated collection of news with commentary, and journalism can be argued to be more socially valuable than music in our current information society. Also, if we're talking about any kind of anonymous posting, yes, it can have value. Including literary value. If Pynchon decided to post Gravity's Rainbow online, would its value as art be diminished? I think I get what you're trying to say, but the way you chose to differentiate data is too arbitrary.

Plus, you seem to be overlooking that fact that "large groups of people agreeing with you" can be made of "individual acts of defiance", and that major economic shifts in point of view take time. We're not going to snap out of the economics of scarcity overnight, but the very existence of Creative Commons is a sign that the opinion you seem to be arguing against is quite widespread. I don't really know if it's on the rise, though I'd wager it is.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[Anonymous Coward]

OP here.

The existence, and popularity, of Creative Commons is a very poignant example of "large groups of people that agree with you." If something like that became the definitive trend, then sites like The Pirate Bay would be a non-sequitur. Or, at least, the name would be. And the hosts certainly wouldn't be ruffling feathers of content creators (let alone being prosecuted for having broken any laws).

Why is it illegal to download the latest Transformers movie? Because the producers, actors, and financial backers do not agree that data is abundant and should be free. If they did, they would have used the Creative Commons license to begin with. As it stands, their rejection of the principles behind that license is shared by the politicians for whom they voted, the judges who hear the complaints they bring, and a large enough percentage of the voting population that their concept of data ownership continues to be the way things are done.

If enough people agreed on Creative Commons as a solution, then movies, music, etc. would all be distributed under such a licence anyway, and without changing any laws the problem would simply vanish.

Anyway, about the difference between an anonymous post (like mine) and the latest Transformers movie....

It doesn't matter how philosophically and scientifically precise your understanding of data may be, that is not how people think of it. In practical terms, the effort and money I put into this post pales in comparison to that which gets put into the making of a movie. Similarly, the market-penetration and value of my post to the end-users also pales in comparison. But both of those are inconsequential compared to the concepts used to understand posts vs movies. People think of a movie as a different kind of thing, deserving of different handling, than a bit of an anonymous conversation on a blog. So, as far as most actual human beings are concerned, they are different, and should be treated differently by the law. You can argue against this all you want, but the majority of the human population will tell you to pound sand.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[savuporo]

Anonymous posting on Slashdot could give an explanation to supersymmetry, detail a working cheap fusion reactor or do any number of more critical things than do another iteration of "ooh ooh baby". More likely it will be about hot grits though

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[jenningsthecat]

I agree with much of what you've said, and you stated it reasonably and eloquently. However, there is one part I would change:

As it stands, their rejection of the principles behind that license is shared by the politicians for whom they paid, the judges who were appointed by said politicians, and a large enough percentage of the anaesthetized-and-spell-bound-by-bread-and-circuses voting population that their concept of data ownership continues to be the way things are done.

I think it's important to recognize that things are the way they are at least in part because politicians and laws are sold to the highest bidder, and because a large portion of the electorate is too clueless, uncritical, self-absorbed, or otherwise distracted to care.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[silas_moeckel]

If you have a number randomly extending on into infinity then somewhere in it is every possible sequence of numbers of any length.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[sexconker]

For any normal number, each digit appears just as frequently as any other, and each pair of digits appears just as equally as any other, etc.

In base 10 (that is, base two, since all bases except base one are base 10):
0 and 1 appear 50% of the time each.
00, 01, 10, and 11 appear 25% of the time each.
etc.

So when you've got infinite digits, ALL strings of numbers of length n are uniformly present within the number, and thus all digital works ever created or to be created are present within it. Of course that's all bullshit since irrational numbers don't exist in our quantum Universe.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[sjames]

The idea is that PI never stops and every possible number sequence (including the complete music catalog of Metallica in MP3 format) is in there somewhere.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[John.Banister]

Taylor Swift - Fearless + Speak Now - Red = pi ?

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[Kalium70]

The .torrent files only contain metadata. The NSA assured us that metadata isn't really data. Something does not quite match up here.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[serviscope_minor]

Of course that's all bullshit since irrational numbers don't exist in our quantum Universe.

what the fuck does that even mean?

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[jones_supa]

No, no, no. Technically you are correct, but the .torrent file (or magnet link) is still the only way to tap to the data. Saying that it is ultimately hosted and transferred by the clients is just semantics. TPB provides here the whole infrastructure (search, torrent tracker) to make the pirating possible. Sure, you can wrap up TPB as a bag of magnet links and pass it to friends, but that would be ultimately very clunky, as no one couldn't administer the site. So the central site plays a big role here. TPB would lose a lot of its power if the main site didn't exist.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[martin-boundary]

An anonymous posting on a blog is *not the same thing* as a musical piece that required a lot of talent and upfront costs to produce.

Actually, they aren't that far apart, as you yourself demonstrate. Both require *years* of study and training, and even then can only be produced by a minority of individuals with the skills, the time, and resources to do so.

You didn't forget that learning to read and write adequately took you 15+ years, did you? That's easily comparable to the time it took the musicians to perfect their particular art, if not longer. And your grammar betrays you as well. You are not one of the millions of unwashed masses who rite like tat. You are part of an elite of sorts, not unlike the musicians who perform to the standard required in your post.

The level of control asserted over data, by the wealthy entrenched powers, is precisely the level of control that the unwashed masses choose to abide.

I'm going to have to disagree on that. The truth I see is that the unwashed masses don't choose to abide at all. In fact, the unwashed masses choose to download songs and movies. Your claim that the absence of overwhelming opposition to the laws indicates assent is naive. Modern populations in our democracies know that majority rule isn't how things work. It makes no sense to vote for one of several alternatives, when none of them actually represents your views.

In a world where presidents can be elected without a popular majority, you don't waste your time playing the voting game. What you do is what works for you, ie you let the rich people argue about copyright, and while they do you share movies with your friends and live your life.

You can change the system through, and only through, large groups of people that agree with you.

On this we agree. But whereas you believe in "voting" sine qua non, I believe that change happens de facto, through grassroots behaviour. Such as sharing movies widely until it's accepted as normal by those with power. And that's what I see happening (the former, we're not at the latter stage yet).

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[drinkypoo]

The idea is that PI never stops and every possible number sequence (including the complete music catalog of Metallica in MP3 format) is in there somewhere.

Hopefully, even Pi is smart enough to avoid St. Anger.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[arth1]

If you take the circumference of the universe and divided by its diameter you would get a finite result.

You're making assumptions here that may not be correct. There's no certainty that our universe has a circumference, nor a diameter.
One of the possibilities is that the universe is like Asteroids, in that once you hit the edge on one side, you reappear at the other side. There aren't really any edges - our view just happens to be centered on where the spaceship appears.
Now expand this view from 2D to 3D.

There's also the problem that far away parts of the universe expand faster than the speed of light, which means you cannot measure the distance between them because even time can't exceed the speed of light. You can't say that "now" it's N billion light years across, because there is no "now" that applies to what's beyond our event horizon. The light from a star there, should it exist, will never reach us, because the distance between us increases faster than photons travel and time propagates.

To measure the size of the universe, you need two time dimensions. We don't have any theories for that, at least not yet.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[Znork]

Maths are just an abstract concept so a finite universe has no bearing on the existence of infinite number series. Apart from the ability to actually write them down on paper in their full glory.

However, there's nothing preventing the extraction of specific subsets and playing that subset in a music player.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[ultranova]

You can't say that "now" it's N billion light years across, because there is no "now" that applies to what's beyond our event horizon.

Or anywhere, really.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[dnaumov]

Except laws and court proceedings are supposed to precisely deal with exactly semantics. That's half the reason they exist in the first place.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[SuricouRaven]

And rather awkwardly, the number of bits required to represent the address of a sequence is, on average, proportional to the length of a sequence. So no magic compression algorithm.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[Richy_T]

That is not how Pi is defined. Pi is defined mathematically.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[Splab]

It means, it's turtles all the way down.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[Typical Slashdotter]

Of course that's all bullshit since irrational numbers don't exist in our quantum Universe.

I was soclose to modding you up for an otherwise good technical explanation, until I got to this ridiculous last sentence. Oh well.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[dave420]

They haven't run a tracker since November 2009, btw.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[sexconker]

LOL then u dumb. If the Universe is quantum, then:

All of calculus is wrong, there are no spheres, or circles, thus there is no Pi, etc. There would also then be no such thing as irrational numbers.

If the Universe is finite then you'd never be able to fully evaluate an irrational number.
Even if the Universe is infinite, a quantum Universe would dictate that you would always be outside the light cone of the full evaluation of an irrational number. If you use the most densely-packed matter/energy possible to write out Pi or the square root of 2, the size of its physical construct would still be infinite, therefore all things are outside the light cone of some of the digits. Even if you wrote out all digits instantly this would still apply.

From a practical point, the conjecture of a normal number containing all works ever created boils down to NOPE because you'd never find them.
A 2 minute MP3 at 128 kbps means the song occurs with frequency of 1 / 2^15728640. You'd need to check, on average, 2^15728639 strings of length to find that MP3. You'd need 1.349 * 10 ^ 4734792 bits of storage just to write down your number to have a 50% chance of finding your song.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[david_thornley]

You seem to be under the impression that mathematics has to be based on physical things. It doesn't, although some physical things are useful for visualization or demonstration. The mathematical concept of a sphere is just as valid in a quantum or continuous Universe. Calculus is valid in either case. If the Universe is discrete rather than continuous, then the mathematical descriptions are extremely close approximations, rather than being, um, extremely close approximations.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[suutar]

even in a quantized universe, 2 still doesn't have a rational square root.

Re:That's not true and you know it.

[RivenAleem]

GP was talking about a musical piece that required a lot of talent, not Metallica.

The raid wasn't the start of prosecution...

[bhlowe]

The raid came after repeated attempts to have the owners shut down the site on their own accord. By ignoring and mocking the multiple attempts at warning their behavior may be in violation of laws, they chose to fight the battle in a court of law. Courts of law have police to enforce their decisions. Their mocking of take-down notices and repeated claims that they are only facilitating pirating (not actual pirating) can and should be interpreted by courts and juries.

Re:The raid wasn't the start of prosecution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take-down notices have no force of law behind them. I could write a take-down notice to Slashdot to remove your comment, and if Slashdot ignores me, it's not going to be counted against them when I later sue. It's literally just a piece of paper or email written by someone who might have a law degree.

8 month prison sentence in sweden?

[voss]

Ive seen youth hostels and college dorms worse than swedish prison cells.

Re:8 month prison sentence in sweden?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen any youth hostel or college dorm better than a Swedish prison cell. Come on, you even get to go home during weekends (after serving 2 months).

Now, Swedish jails on the other hand are pretty horrible things. Solitary confinement before being convicted...

Re:8 month prison sentence in sweden?

[amiga3D]

I think he meant "cleaner than."

Re:8 month prison sentence in sweden?

[Tom]

But you can leave a hostel or college dorm at any time you want. You can go outside when the weather is good, you can go to a cinema, meet friends, be with your girlfriend, spend time on your hobbies, etc. etc. etc.

The defining part of prison is not that the rooms are uncomfortable, you know?

Re:8 month prison sentence in sweden?

[amaurea]

Here's a good article about how prisons that treat prisoners well (except for the lack of freedom part) give much lower reoffense rates by building character rather than destroying it.

Re:Euhm holysit batman

[Nehmo]

By American standards, 8 months is a very light sentence. Lots of people spend that much time just awaiting trial, while they are technically innocent by law. My wife, for example, just finished 40 calendar months (lost all good time for tobacco smoking) for possession of a tiny quantity of crack (which I don't do, btw). I could go on with examples that are even worse, but I wanted to show something near to me to demonstrate prevalence.

Speaking from experience?

[Uberbah]

If not, that's a fair amount of obnoxious presumption.

Free stuff sucks

[PsyMan]

Lets be honest, if copyright did not exist and people were all expected to give everything away for free and starve then 1) Quality would plummet 2) The excitement that pirates get when they have had one over on "The Man" when stealing a film/game/tune would vanish. 3) These fun debates would also dry up. I do wonder if Sweden is actually one big US black site though as they always seem to want their biggest criminals shipped off there prior to anything else :P

Re:Free stuff sucks

[jones_supa]

Facepalm.

Re:Free stuff sucks

[SuricouRaven]

You're conflating media types.

I imagine your prediction would be true for movies. It costs millions to make a movie - even the cheap independent ones usually cost at least $100,000, absolute minimum. So no copyright may mean no movies, unless an alternative model is found (Kickstarter, maybe?). Music, on the other hand, would be barely affected at all: The production cost is well within the hobbyist range, and a lot of people make it for personal reasons or for the fame.

Re:Free stuff sucks

[amaurea]

Lets be honest, if copyright did not exist and people were all expected to give everything away for free and starve

It's hard to be honest about what would happen if copyright didn't exist, because we don't know. But we do know that not having copyright doesn't mean that one has to "give everything away for free and starve". Many other alternative means of compensation have been proposed, but we haven't really tested any of them seriously, which is why we aren't sure how it would compare to the current copyright system, quality and amount-wise.

My favorite alternative means of compensation is up-front payment, like we have everywhere else in society. This model has gained quite a bit of steam lately through Kickstarter. Basically, the author asks for the full payment for his work before he performs it, rather than extracting it gradually over years afterwards. The author creates a Kickstarter page detailing his plan for, say, a new work, with some information about what it would be about, and states a price he wants for writing it (say 50,000€), possibly with some stretch goals (bonus chapter after 100,000€, for example). Potential readers then choose how much money they want to commit. Once enough money to reach the author's price has been reached, he gets the money, and starts working. If too much time passes (time-limit is commonly 90 days with Kickstarter) without the goal being reached, then the potential readers get their money back, and the author must try some other approach.

The advantage of this approach is that since the author has already been paid before he does the work, he does not need to control copying: copies are free, and can be shared freely. The more copies are shared, and the more people who enjoy his work, the easier it will be for him to gather money for his work. What is today called piracy would now just be free advertisement.

The disadvantage of this system is that it will be hard for unknown authors to find people willing to fund them. Probably, their first book would need to be written for free in order to get enough interested readers for this approach to work. On the other hand, in practice authors already write their first book for free under the current system (they need something to show the editor in order to be funded), so this is not a serious disadvantage.

Projects of more than $1,000,000 are regularly funded through Kickstarter, and more than 50,000 projects have been funded during the 4 years since its founding. So a Kickstarter-inspired model of up-front payment really looks like it could work, and I think it's worth a try.

Re:Free stuff sucks

[david_thornley]

Some kinds of music are within the hobbyist range. Symphony orchestras and operas are a bit more work than getting three friends together in the garage.

Re:Free stuff sucks

[SuricouRaven]

With synth technology these days? You don't need a real orchestra any more.

At long last

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally that animal has been brought to justice. His reign of terror is over at long last. It is now safe to leave your house after sundown again.

Nice Jail

[JimSadler]

From the pics that I have seen life in their jails is probably nicer than the home of the average American. Their system does not have anything in common with ours. They seem to actually try hard to improve the life and behavior of an inmate. American prisons have forms of torture such as mind numbing boredom, isolation, unpleasant food, constant noise and deprivation as well as an ever present chance of violence. None of these things do anything to "correct" and inmate so naturally it is usually called The Department Of Corrections.

Re:Euhm holysit batman

[Nehmo]

hahahah crack which I don't do, right

If a person has a behavior that she or he keeps hidden publicly, they often assume other people are doing the same, dispite outward appearances to the contrary. For example, gay people think everybody is gay, perhaps in a repressed way, they may rationalize. And people who do particular popular illicit drugs believe most everybody does those drugs, naturally, not openly. There is certainly evidence to support their suspicions. Unlikely people get busted every day for drugs. But, regarding the drugs, the truth is many people really don't do those drugs. The drug user is simply projecting his or her own situation indiscriminately on others.

Now, I don't claim to be Mr. Clean. I would do heroin again if I could feel it. But I can't because I'm under a large dose of buprenorphine. However, I've never done ecstasy, ice, nor crack.