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.

Comments

the start

[Kkloe]

this is just the first court it passes, lets hope it passes all the other

Now only if...

[mlauzon]

Cox Communications was a European country, because they lost this type of ruling in the US recently.

Re:Now only if...

[mlauzon]

That should be company, stupid autocorrect on my phone!

Re:Now only if...

[gstoddart]

Yeah, well, don't hold your breath ... if the US doesn't launch some form of trade sanctions I'll be surprised.

The US is leading the charge on entrenching in law that the copyright cartel has absolute veto over technology and the internet.

There's a reason why US foreign policy has been pushing to have treaties include this shit, and why the representatives of the copyright lobby are effectively writing the text of the laws and treaties -- and it's because the US politicians have been bought on behalf of these industries.

I wish more rulings like this would happen, and these clowns would find themselves on much shorter leashes (if not short ropes and long drops).

But things like the TPP and every other treaty has proven that the US government is essentially now working on behalf of the copyright cartel, and are prepared to keep giving them bullshit laws which give them all the power, and with little or no penalties and oversight.

Copyright owners have far more legal rights than you or I, and increasingly an accusation of copyright supersedes your right to have someone show you their evidence.

Re:Now only if...

[davecb]

A US court rejected a motion to dismiss: the case still has to go to the jury. And the judge appears to have ignored evidence before him, so it may not even get that far.

Re:Now only if...

[Kjella]

Yeah, well, don't hold your breath ... if the US doesn't launch some form of trade sanctions I'll be surprised.

Since the EU is a free trade block and Sweden is a member, I doubt they can do much of anything. Through good services like Spotify they've curbed much of the public appeal of piracy and the Pirate Party is at ~0.4% far from any seats in the general elections and they lost their MEPs in the 2014 elections. They got more to lose than gain by revitalizing the public debate again, particularly anything that looks like US interference which is what pissed many Swedes off back in 2006.

Re:Now only if...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine by me. Since they have no problem with breaking the covenant with the public, I have no problem in pirating all their shit.

Re:Now only if...

[mlauzon]

It's enabled by default, I just never remove it, because it does come in handy sometimes as if you use a common sentence it keeps it for you to use over and over again.

Re:Now only if...

[sumdumass]

Exactly. . I don't know how many times i need to tell idiots to get off my lawn each and every day. It seems like more and more every day too.

Oh, and I'm not sure Cox lost anything on this front except the ability to claim a DMCA exception. Of course in order to do so, they would have had to blindly follow the takedown process which cutting internet access to anything more than the specific content is not part of.

In other words, they may still be exempt from liability, just not according to a law that doesn't seem to apply to the specific circumstances.

Re:Now only if...

[beastofburdon]

Personally, I really, really want to watch Texas execute a corporation. If they lined up all the executives of the members of RIAA and MPAA and killed them firing squad style I would watch all the Cowboys games and even cheer for them for a year.

Bredbandsbolaget är Toppen!

[Zontar The Mindless]

I've been a very satisfied B2 customer for several years. Dependable service with no caps, no filtering, and no bullshit.

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Re:Nowhere but Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh let me guess. By just blocking the torrent protocol, right? Or blocking Usenet access? How about any other protocols that are used solely for piracy?

Re:Nowhere but Sweden

[fustakrakich]

Nonsense. Pavement people put up all sorts of barriers. And you know what? They can be sued if the barrier fails. But it's physical failure that can cause physical harm.

this basically says "they are not an accomplice"

[Escogido]

so cannot be forced to shut down access only on these particular grounds, but not in general. Russia, for one example, passed a law saying ISPs are required to cut access to offending web sites and services if prosecution (not even a judge) holds them in violation. I kinda expect the western world to adopt similar legislation soon.

Uber and pirate bay

[fluffernutter]

I'm still not quite sure why Uber is allowed to exist contrary to laws that so obviously intended make their business illegal but are allowed to slip between the wording. On the other hand, Pirate Bay is not technically illegal at all because it only tracks the pirated files and does not provided them directly, but yet the laws are being extended to apply to them. I guess the people with money are allowed to bend the law now and apply it how they see fit to the area they see fit and the rest of us will just be expected to live by it.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually makes perfect sense. Think about it like this: Google Maps (The Pirate Bay) provides the location of brick and mortar stores (torrents), and in turn that allows thieves to locate goods that can be stolen (files). Therefore, it is only logical to think that Google is contributing to crime, and they should be sued.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[gstoddart]

I guess the people with money are allowed to bend the law now and apply it how they see fit

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.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[fluffernutter]

I just want to know.... if I go out in the world and I run across the street, should I get a J-walking ticket?

If the wording of the law matters more than the intent, then I should not because I was running not walking. Just a simple example, but I'm sure all kinds of laws could be avoided if you look closely at the wording.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[fluffernutter]

That's unfortunate... because everyone can understand the intent of laws but only people with money for lawyers can work around the wording of them.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[Kjella]

Fortunately for the rest of us, they can't legislate reality. They take down Napster, it goes fully distributed. They flood the networks with shit, torrent sites provide ratings. They go after TPBs trackers, we get magnet links. They start blocking at ISP level, torrents go encrypted. And sometimes they run into setbacks, they couldn't shut down the Bittorrent protocol. They haven't been able to shut down file lockers. Their mass lawsuits/shakedowns have largely been halted. VPNs and open Wifi is still legal. And when they do score a win like being able to shut down a site, a zillion mirrors and proxies pop up making it futile.

The war on piracy hasn't exactly had the same kind of popular appeal as the war on drugs. It is a lot easier to come up with horror stories about crack whores and heroin addicts than about people pirating MP3s. I'm guessing this is the main reason we haven't seen haven't seen bigger legal opposition is the fact that offense is the best defense, so far the easiest solution has been to come up with a better tool. If they manage to get rapid-fire site take downs in the DNS system, there's also the dark web solution. The TOR system isn't built for heavy P2P, but just for getting magnet links - which is the only thing you need to bootstrap the process - it's plenty. So from where I'm standing they might get bigger and bigger guns, but the target is getting harder and harder to hit in the first place and punch through the armor if you do.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[AK Marc]

Jaywalking isn't illegal anywhere in the world. Illegally crossing the street is against the law in some places. And jaywalking is a term some people use to describe illegal crossing of the street.

Yes that matters in law. If everyone tomorrow were to call murder "ham sandwich" Then giving someone a "ham sandwich" would be illegal, but it wouldn't be illegal to give someone a sandwich made of ham. What people call the illegal act has no bearing on the legality of something that sounds similar to the common term for an illegal act.

Re:Uber and pirate bay

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirate Bay is not technically illegal at all because it only tracks the pirated files and does not provided them directly, but yet the laws are being extended to apply to them.

Pirate Bay is doing exactly what Google is doing -- providing links to unauthorized distribution of files. There is no legally-important technical difference between the links provided by the two services, and there is no significant difference in the breadth of the unauthorized content you can find on the two services. They also make money from their sites in an identical way -- by displaying ads.

The primary reason why Pirate Bay is being targeted is because they are small and poorly-funded, whereas Google has a massive legal team to keep the bad guys at bay.

Re:Nowhere but Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit

It is impossible to stop someone from accessing any site they want.

You are technically inept.

The easiest way to copy music illegally is to download a video from YouTube and use ffmpeg to strip out the music.

You going to propose that YouTube gets blocked?

google.com has the most links to infringing copies in the world. Block them.

Re:Recent story

[davester666]

yes, comcast, for failing to obey the never-ending demands of big media.

Re:Recent story

[darkain]

I think you mean COX? ... because Comcast *IS* said big media.

Re:Sweden also can't ban my bum smacking machine

[darkain]

1) Use stale memes
2) Post about cows
3) ???
4) PROFIT!

SWEDEN YES!

[Lehk228]

SWEDEN YES!

Re:Sweden also can't ban my bum smacking machine

[cbiltcliffe]

Cows are for COWS! MOOOO! Cows are all cows!

Wait.....

Except it is

[aliquis]

Expect it obviously is, according to the court.

I guess, considering the founders was sentenced for "assistance" or something, completely retarded but that's what all of the official Sweden is. Fucking traitors and idiots.

Internet should be viewed as ...

[CaptainDork]

... a utility like water, electricity and gas (US here).

A house equipped with all of these can support a meth lab but that doesn't mean that the city water department "participated," legally, in the meth lab.

Re:torrent = thief

[penguinoid]

Not everyone thinks that granting people 1 billion years* of exclusive use of an idea is something that ought to be supported.

* Yes, it's only ~100 years now, but do you really think they'll ever let it expire? Since copyright's lifespan is now longer than human's lifespan, making it longer doesn't really make a difference other than to quash historical production so as to push up the price of new production.