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Pirate Bay Co-founder Arrested In Northeastern Thailand
New submitter SeeingMole writes, just a few days after Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Warg was found guilty in Denmark, that Thai immigration police arrested 36-year-old Fredrik Neij, aka TiAMO, while driving a car to pass through the border checkpoint from Laos into Thailand with his Lao wife. He was wearing the same shirt that he wore in his arrest warrant photo. In 2009, Neij was convicted along with Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundstroem of 'assisting in making copyright content available' in Stockholm, Sweden. Also at the BBC; thanks to reader iONiUM.
For wearing the same shirt. If only he had changed, they never would have noticed him.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
A swig of grog for our mateys who are rotting in the brig! :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
ALl this man did was help build a search enging allowing people to share.
This only benefits society.
There is no stealing, despite what some ignorant people unable to think for themselves claim.
Is there a loss in profit for original work? No doubt, but I would argue this is superseded by a) the increase in sales that piracy has been shown to affect, and b) the huge benefit to society by allowing information to be more freely accessible, to inspire and educate.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I doubt very much that his method of communication with others had anything to do with things. He was arrested at a border checkpoint, so I suspect all that happened was they checked his ID as a matter of routine and got a red flag because of the arrest warrant. I doubt very much that a Thai/Loatian border guard would even know who Fredrik Neij was, let alone recognise his shirt as being the one in his arrest photo. What's more surprising to me is that Neij was attempting border crossings with an outstanding international arrest warrant - unless he wasn't aware of the warrant or the Thailand-Laos border control isn't particularly robust.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Welp, they got him! Don't we all feel so much safer. After all, the heinous crime of "assisting in making copyright content available" surely warrants the international manhunts. I can walk downstairs and buy a stack of any movies or games or, well, anything I wish in the open in China..good thing countries like the US use grand tools like embargos to press the Chinese government to do something about it!
It's easy to pick a famous name - or create symbols for these 'wars' and spend ridiculous amounts of money on the behalf of old-style big business with lobbyists and donations...but the solution to piracy is to change the business model employed by the companies or artists who are being hurt by piracy. Louis CK famously sold $1mil in a week worth of $5 specials on his own website, why? Because he put out a great product and said: You don't need to sign up with a bunch of information or provide me with a bunch of details, or opt into some kind of marketing scheme, you can give me $5 and get a product, and watch it anywhere on any device you want..or pirate it.. do whatever you like - but I'm trying to provide a quality product and hopefully you'll appreciate that.
The alternative is to fall into the game, music, and movie big industry problem of pushing out a massive amount of shit at high 'standardised' pricing to audiences who are tired of spending too much and getting too little, and as a result, driving people to simply pirate and try things before deciding what they really want to support. Personally I pirate most of my games, I also bought legitimate consoles and buy legitimate copies of games I *really* want, or buy authentic DVD/sets when there is something I really like out there - 100% of which I have already seen.
They'll get the hint, someday, or crumble eventually. For now, people like Gottfrid need to be admired for what they've contributed to making change happen.
Fuck dude. Maybe you should realize that you are useless. You provide no value. You job and thousands like you can be replaced by exactly 0 people. The small niche players were never cared for or looked after by the likes of you. They provided you no money, so you were no interested. With the democratization of the internet, the small players may actually have a niche. But you can buy off your hired guns and arrest people like this. So I guess you can continue making money for a little while
The long arm of the law only extends to copyright. Stick to tax fraud and there is apparently nothing they can do.
... SRT has been in development for several years and its success rate improved greatly after Google bought out the shirt recognition technology site, "Shirt Happens," back in 2011.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Maybe he is used to do it, and this time forgot to bring money to bribe someone.
"Crimes?"
Maybe a technicality, but isn't copyright violation a civil matter, and not a crime?
He committed horrible atrocities against Sony and EA's profits!!
It would be less sad if they had at least proved that.
I'm curious if you and the parent both feel very strongly about ethics in games journalism
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The Pirate bay is well known, high profile, and a very receptive target for litigation. the founders likely know that arresting them, imprisoning them, and litigating them will have very little impact on torrent and file sharing sites as a whole. TPB is sufficiently clustered to avoid most politically induced outages, while full outages merely drive the support and creation of new sites and technologies to avoid future outages and tracking. Magnet links and SSL were a direct result of TPB users feeling insecure.
Good people go to bed earlier.
At least Thailand can now get back to what they do best. Child prostitution, human trafficking, destroying their reef, heroin production led by the elite, fake purses, and selling dvds of new movies in broad daylight. Oh, and killing poor drug users.
I don't think Gitmo is where he should go, but as a guy who was co-responsible for a site that vomits malware through sketchy as fuck ads, he should have to answer for his crimes on some level.
(Saying that people who don't run adblock deserve the shit they get is victim blaming, so don't be an asshole)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
To be fair, EA has committed far more horrible atrocities against EA's profits.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Devil's advocate, but shady "finance" people that rip off unsuspecting moms with investment ideas and pyramid schemes. No violent crime. No one dead. Should they be given a pass?
Just think that if he had sold billions of bad mortgages and defrauded both investors and the public sending the entire world economy to the brink of collapse, he would have gotten no jail time and a multi-billion dollar bailout.
Instead he built a web page that lets people find trackers, and he must be put away for life.
'Merica!!!!!
If I recall correctly, they where convicted of criminal copyright infringement. If I post an image on my website that is normal copyright infringement, but if print that same image on cards and sell them I am criminal copyright infringement. The difference is that I do it in a "commercial way" and with "significant damage". The really important difference is that copyright holders can get the police involved and serve jail sentences in criminal copyright infringement.
But your assertion is correct, copyright is a civil matter, how they got criminal copyright infringement is a mystery to me. This is especially perverse, since the maximum jail sentence for criminal copyright infringement is 3 years and rape is 2 years.
Tell that to Al Capone.
Discard the shirts I'm wearing in all my mugshots.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Do you have any conception whatsoever of how lame that rhetoric is? I'd like to think you do, and that it is just cynical misdirection, but I have my doubts. I think possibly you are so brainwashed or you have an axe to grind in terms of personal livelihood that you really don't have any conception of the issues.
Anyway, I'll spell it out. Your parallel is blatantly false. If you take stuff out of my car and home and into yours or somebody else's, you deprive me of the use of my property. You can't readily "copy" my car or my car radio or living room sofa in a magic replicator, while still leaving me the original. If you could do that, more power to you. Of course I wouldn't mind in the least. Some day, when the Star Trek universe becomes reality, such replication might become possible.
Copying movies and songs does not involve any theft. Nobody loses access to the movie or the song. Only somebody else now enjoys the same access, and has in no way inconvenienced anyone thereby. Yes, the guys with the thoroughly obsolete business model will be annoyed at its disruption. But they should be annoyed at reality, the harsh undeniable universe, and the march of progress, not people whose only sin is that they actually understand reality and progress. I don't get my kicks from seeing people facing a hardship making their livelihood because of progress, but I am in contempt of the viewpoint that they are entitled.
You can make a stand against the electrophotographic copier, digital computing and copying equipment, and communications infrastructure like the internet. I prefer to use them and marvel at the benefits they provide.
Disclaimer: I don't try to profit or make a living by violating copyright. A sufficient reason - I won't claim the only reason - is because I am a sniveling coward and have no wish to rot in jail. I have the common decency to neither condemn nor praise such activity.
I don't recall Al Capone leaving the country.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
While games are among the things you can pirate on TPB, there isn't much to do with games here. Though with regard to his wife...I'm pretty sure that's a mail order bride situation, only due to the circumstances of avoiding incarceration he came to live in her native country. You can see the details of their marriage arrangement in that documentary called TPB AFK, and it's apparent that he paid a sum of money to be able to marry her, and she doesn't really seem *that* fond of him in any of the shots that she's in.
I don't think mail order bride situations are all bad mind you. I've met a few of the women in such a situation, and they seem to prefer their present situation WAY more than what they had prior to the arrangement. One of the ones I knew used to live in the Philippines, and she told me how she almost died there when some Islamic activist ended up suicide bombing a bus that she luckily happened to be late for. That, and she was dirt poor there.