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Swedish Court: ISPs Can't Be Forced To Ban the Pirate Bay (thelocal.se)
An anonymous reader writes: After years of rulings against The Pirate Bay around Europe, a Swedish court has now ruled that the country's ISPs can't be forced to block access to the torrent indexer. The case centers around copyright holders and an ISP called Bredbandsbolaget. The ISP refused to comply with demands that music pirates be cut off from internet access. When rightsholders couldn't get traction that way, they added Bredbandsbolaget to their list of targets. The court found that the ISP does not "participate" in copyright infringement carried out by its subscribers, and is thus not liable for any damages incurred.
More accurately ... the copyright lobby has bought and paid for laws which they interpret how are applied, enforced outside of the judicial system, with abysmally low thresholds for evidence ... and with shockingly little penalties for them if they misuse it.
In case you have missed, copyright related laws have reached a special level of stupidity, because they've been paid for and written by the people who benefit from them. This shit is now routinely entrenched in high-level treaty negotiations, where governments act on behalf of the interests of multi-national corporations -- and literally just use whatever text provided by the lobbyists.
They're not bending any laws, they're outright financing the adoption of laws which are entirely written to give them massive amounts of latitude to do as they please without penalty.
Governments these days are pretty much openly working for the corporations in this matter.
Copyright is like kiddie porn and terrorism; it lives in a special place outside of most other forms of laws, and builds in shortcuts and bypasses to legal protections you would normally have.
This is way beyond bending the law, it's about buying their own laws.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.