Swedish Court Says ISPs Can't Be Forced To Block Pirate Bay

The Next Web reports that a district court in Sweden has ruled that it cannot simply force ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, despite its role in large-scale copyright violation. A coalition of copyright holders including Sony and a group representing the Swedish film industry wanted the court to force Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget to curtail access, as courts have done in various cases around the world. The court found that Bredbandsbolaget couldn’t be held responsible for the copyright infringement of its customers’ actions while using the service as it doesn’t constitute a crime under Swedish law, according to the report. As such, it’s also not liable for any of the fines. While it could still be overturned by a higher authority appeals court, the group representing the copyright holders will have to pay the ISPs legal costs thus far, which is more than $150,000 according to TorrentFreak. (And here's TorrentFreak's report.) Update: 11/29 15:55 GMT by T : Oops -- sorry, we've mentioned this once already.

Comments

Dupe, I assume?

[blind biker]

eom

Dupe

[Zontar The Mindless]

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

timothy!

[borcharc]

king of the dupes and other pointless posts timothy strikes again!

Re: timothy!

[blind biker]

Rob Malda (AKA CmdrTaco) was far, far worse with dupes. CmdrTaco really didn't give a shit and about 1/3rd of his posts were dupes. One time he actually posted two dupes of the same story (something about Google publishing open APIs to their services). Strangely, CmdrTaco didn't get as much heat for his dupes at Timothy does these days.

A dire indictment

[Teun]

It's a dire indictment for a media outlet when their own editors no longer read it...

designed & marketed for specific unlawful purp

[raymorris]

Other courts have noticed that Pirate Bay is called PIRATE Bay, and it is designed and marketed for a specific purpose, an unlawful one. A gun just a priced of metal, right? Under laws the laws of most countries, it's a piece of metal with a specific intended use, and it's regulated based on that.

One might argue that copyright terms are too long in many countries; you could even make an argument against copyright protection at all (though the argument doesn't fair well in the face of facts). You can't make a coherent argument that Pirate Bay isn't for pirating - for violating the -legal- rights of others. That makes it inherently different from Google or any general search engine.

Double Whammy

[penguinoid]

It's not a dupe, it's a double whammy. They can't force ISPs to block piratebay, and they have to pay their legal costs.

Maybe instead of spending all our time complaining about dupes, we could instead use one post to laugh at them for being unable to block TPB and the other one to laugh about their having to pay the legal fees.