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

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.

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

[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.