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'

[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'

[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'

[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'

[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'

[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'

[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).

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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:8 months in a Swedish prison

[cpghost]

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

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?

[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: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.

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.