Swedish Govt Mulls Tougher Punishments To Tackle Pirate Sites (torrentfreak.com)

Authorities in Sweden are mulling new measures to deal with evolving 'pirate' sites. As part of a legislative review, the government wants to assess potential legal tools, including categorizing large-scale infringement as organized crime, tougher sentences, domain seizures, and site-blocking, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: Sweden is now considering its options when it comes to its future prosecutions of large-scale copyright infringement cases. As part of a review now underway, the government is accessing the powers it needs to deal with more serious cases of copyright infringement. Police national coordinator for intellectual property crimes Paul Pinter hopes that any changes will enable police to operate more efficiently in the future. "If you have a felony, you can get access to a whole new toolkit. In the terms of reference for the inquiry, the government mentions almost all of the points that we have previously proposed," he told IDG. Considering the way anti-piracy enforcement has developed over the past several years, few of the suggestions from the police come as a surprise. At the top of the tree is treating pirate site operators as more than just large-scale copyright infringers. The Justice Department says that due to the manner in which sites are organized and the subsequent development of revenue, treating them as self-contained crime operations may be appropriate.

Comments

Sweden

[Citizen of Earth]

Doesn't Sweden have bigger problems, like Muslim rape gangs making it the rape capital of the world?

Re:Sweden

[RobotRunAmok]

Are you saying that the Swedes are so mentally challenged they can't fix their rape gang and copyright infringement problems at the same time?

Re:Sweden

[muffen]

Doesn't Sweden have bigger problems, like Muslim rape gangs making it the rape capital of the world?

No, but Sweden does have a very broad definition of rape, things that in many countries wouldn't even be considered illegal, are considered rape in Sweden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Anyways, why bother with facts when you can use #alternativefacts, the latter doesn't even require any references.

Re:Sweden

[Opportunist]

I say that they're probably not going to solve either problem.

If they can, the rest of the world would certainly want to know HOW!

Re:Sweden

[drquoz]

Short answer:

No.

Long answer:

The Sweden story has become absolutely viral. You’ve probably read a version in a Facebook post, or heard it in a speech or debate. It is the argument-ender of the intolerant: To make the case against refugees, or immigration, or “Islam,” you recount a couple of stories about refugee-camp horrors, some random anecdotes of sex crimes involving brown people in various countries, and then drop the Sweden story.

Behind it you’ll find the resurrection of an old, deadly appeal to fear – that people of certain skin colours are natural-born predators who threaten white women. It’s a version of lynch-mob logic that happens to appeal to the liberal and tolerant as much as the hateful and intolerant.

And it falls apart as soon as you speak to anyone knowledgeable in Sweden.

“What we’re hearing is a very, very extreme exaggeration based on a few isolated events, and the claim that it’s related to immigration is more or less not true at all,” says Jerzy Sarnecki, a criminologist at Stockholm University who has devoted his career to the study of criminality, ethnicity and age.

Sweden does indeed have far more reported cases of sexual assault than any other country. But it’s not because Swedes – of any colour – are very criminal. It’s because they’re very feminist. In 2005, Sweden’s Social Democratic government introduced a new sex-crime law with the world’s most expansive definition of rape.

Imagine, for example, if your boss rubbed against you in an unwanted way at work once a week for a year. In Canada, this would potentially be a case of sexual assault. Under Germany’s more limited laws, it would be zero cases. In Sweden, it would be tallied as 52 separate cases of rape. If you engaged in a half-dozen sex acts with your spouse, then later you felt you had not given consent, in Sweden that would be classified as six cases of rape.

The marked increase in rape cases during the 2000s is almost entirely a reflection of Sweden’s deep public interest in sexual equality and the rights of women, not of attacks by newcomers.

But aren’t refugees and immigrants responsible for a greater share of Sweden’s sexual assaults?

In a sense. Statistics show that the foreign-born in Sweden, as in most European countries, do have a higher rate of criminal charges than the native-born, in everything from shoplifting to murder (though not enough to affect the crime rate by more than a tiny margin). The opposite is true in North America, where immigrants have lower-than-average crime rates.

Why the difference? Because people who go to Sweden are poorer, and crime rates are mostly a product not of ethnicity but of class. In a 2013 analysis of 63,000 Swedish residents, Prof. Sarnecki and his colleagues found that 75 per cent of the difference in foreign-born crime is accounted for by income and neighbourhood, both indicators of poverty. Among the Swedish-born children of immigrants, the crime rate falls in half (and is almost entirely concentrated in lesser property crimes) and is 100-per-cent attributable to class – they are no more likely to commit crimes, including rape, than ethnic Swedes of the same family income.

What also stands out is that almost all the victims of these crimes – especially sex crimes – are also foreign-born. But for a handful of headline-grabbing atrocities, it isn’t a case of swarthy men preying on white women, but of Sweden’s system turning refugees into victims of crime.

That is the real Swedish crisis. Refugee shelters are terrible, dangerous places, whoever is in them. When such shelters, then known as displaced persons camps, held millions of Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s, histories show they were at risk of sexual predation and organized attacks against Jewish refugees.

Because otherwise gener

Re:Sweden

[ezdiy]

Curious, I always wondered why people in this camp parrot "immigrant rapes are cherry picked cases by nationalists" - and while that is definitely true most of the time, you can still find direct police statistics that african immigrants, per capita, are about 5-10x (depending on city) more likely to commit a crime compared to slav immigrants (read white immigrants). And there's a lot of to compare to, including warzones (yugoslavia 20 years ago, ukraine now). They integrate almost perfectly within few months, yet come from comparable economic backgrounds. How is that possible?

Perhaps there is a thing or two about incompatble cultures clashing? What is the exact plan to resolve these clashes? Is whitewashing that issue completely and merely criticizing populist wingnuts really a way to go to sway the popular opinion?

Re:Sweden

[ravenshrike]

That would only be applicable to the situation if Sweden had high rapes rate that remained unchanged. Instead, it has steadily increased as more and more refugees arrive.

Re:Sweden

[Rakarra]

Why the difference? Because people who go to Sweden are poorer, and crime rates are mostly a product not of ethnicity but of class. In a 2013 analysis of 63,000 Swedish residents, Prof. Sarnecki and his colleagues found that 75 per cent of the difference in foreign-born crime is accounted for by income and neighbourhood, both indicators of poverty. Among the Swedish-born children of immigrants, the crime rate falls in half (and is almost entirely concentrated in lesser property crimes) and is 100-per-cent attributable to class – they are no more likely to commit crimes, including rape, than ethnic Swedes of the same family income.

In other words, do NOT import poor refugees. Sounds like an important lesson to take away.

Re:Sweden

[F.Ultra]

By your own links the number of reported rapes have gone from 4208 in 2005 to 5918 in 2015, that is in increase by 41% and not 1500%.

Your second link for the "reported gang rapes" says that this was a measurement up to 2006 which is long before the current migration that you are talking about. Also it talks about alcohol being the main culprit, that the legal definition change that GP talked about explains some of the increases and so on.

Re:Sweden

[CustomSolvers2]

direct police statistics that african immigrants, per capita, are about 5-10x (depending on city) more likely to commit a crime compared to slav immigrants (read white immigrants)

I see various problems with this sentence:

- Referring to an abstract authority ("direct police statistics") without providing any kind of tangible evidence seems, at least, unreliable. What is even worse: your conclusion (African immigrants more prone to crime) seem to be exclusively supported by this non-existent (at least, from the point of view of this conversation) data. What begs the question: is also your knowledge about all this exclusively based upon equivalent general statements?

- Let's imagine that you have high quality datasets undoubtedly proving that people from certain countries tend to commit more crimes. In that case, I would wonder about the applicability of this information. For example: does it refer to the last year or to 10 years ago? Which city/region/country is it about? Are there lots of crimes in this area? Is it a rich/poor area? What types of crime are more common?, etc.
It isn't the same a conflictive neighbourhood in a poor country than in a rich one; or minor shop-lifting vs. homicides. "Crimes anywhere by anyone" includes a huge amount of completely unrelated information whose global understanding seems impossible. Something like "petty crime in city X in summer" would make much more sense to me. But even in that case, you wouldn't be able to reliably extrapolate these conclusions to a completely different situation (e.g., "homicides in city Y during the whole year"). I think that the most logical next step (after having defined the aforementioned more adequate subset of information) would be to properly analyse this information with the sole goal of getting some worthy insights which might, eventually, be applicable under different conditions. Or, even better, they might be put together with other conclusions extracted from different situations to get some preliminary general ideas.

- I might even ignore the previous point too and ask about the criminals being analysed. Are all they coming from the same country? From which region/city in that country? What about their personality? Have they families? And their motivations to go to a different country? What are their options in the new country? Can they speak the language there? Do they like/accept the local culture and traditions? What about their education, motivations, beliefs, etc.?
Generic features like race or gender or physical appearance make only sense within a given context like country/culture, social status, etc. People with similar generic features tend to have a similar personality in equivalent contexts, but completely different in other places. What is common in your neighbourhood (for a reason) might be a complete nonsense (also for a reason there) just 500 km away. Even in the same neighbourhood, some people are different than others with similar features (always for a reason). Even the same person might show a completely different behaviour some years later (again for a reason).

You can know something about me by reading this post or what I wrote somewhere else. Even just some abstract information about me might be enough to get some worthy ideas about my personality. But the best way you have to know what I am/want/expect, would do, how I would react, whether I would like you or not, etc. would be by knowing me really well. And even in that case the best result you could get is a reasonably-good estimate of what might be my future behaviour under certain conditions.

I am a man, like around half of global population. I am white, like 1.3k million (first reference I found in internet). I am a Spaniard, like 45 million, etc. I have nothing in common with most of the other members of any of these groups. Do you prefer sub-groups? Like white-man-Spaniard, we are still around 20 million and I feel equally unrepresented. I can go like this forever, by being more

Re:Sweden

[davester666]

and we definitely should be locking up anyone who fucks a copyright thief.

Re:Sweden

[gweihir]

What "rape gangs"? You would think that European media would report these, but there is nothing. Seems to be FakeNews that is part of a propaganda campaign serving to keep the US in fear because of "how bad it is in Europe already". Fact is, except for some isolated incidents, this does problem does not exist.

Re:Sweden

[gweihir]

Reading comprehension and comprehension of situation described: Fail

Re: Sweden

[Zontar The Mindless]

Yes, pretty much. (Expat here, have lived in Stockholm for about 10 years now.)

You should also be aware that, in Sweden, any sort of attention given to a member of the opposite sex that is not very "strictly business" tends to be regarded as sexual interest. Especially if you are male. For example, do not ever compliment a female coworker on anything to do with her appearance unless you know her extremely well--9 times out of ten, this will be regarded as though you're hitting on her.

Swedish office culture is such that, if you do make friends with (in my case) a woman at work, be prepared for tonnes of sideways looks and gossip based on the assumption that there's no other possible explanation for the two of you to be having lunch alone together, of course you must be sleeping together! This has happened to me twice, despite the fact that I'm very happily married and fairly vocal about it, and in neither case was there any suggestion whatsoever between the women in question (FWIW: one lives with her boyfriend, the other's married with 2 kids) and me that there was anything at all going on other than that we enjoyed some friendly conversation over lunch and didn't care for having to talk over everyone else while doing so.

It sometimes goes the other way, too; not long ago, my wife (who is also not native to Sweden) was having a difficult time discussing a technical matter with a male colleague, and after wasting the better part of an hour going in circles with him, decided that maybe it was best to let it lie for awhile and then come back to it later, perhaps in a different setting. So she said, quite innocently, something like, "Okay, we're not getting anywhere with this right now. Let's have a chat over coffee later on today without so many distractions and maybe I can make this clearer to you then?" His response? "B-b-b-but... I thought you were married?!" Whereupon she had to burn up an additional 15 minutes reassuring the guy that it was strictly business. As she remarked to me, "They talk about how equal men and women are here and how sophisticated they are about sex and relationships, but the real story is that their minds are stuck in junior high school."

Re:Sweden

[gweihir]

There were a few rapes in Koeln, but not more than usual at that time and not on the streets and not by immigrants specifically. The problem there was assault and robbery, and it most definitely was an isolated incident that did not repeat this year.

Europe is not falling to the barbarian hordes at all, even if some people want to create that impression.
 

Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[TimothyHollins]

Treating copyright infringement the same as organized crime sounds like an MPAA/RIAA-controlled alternate reality. I guess a lot of money went into "convincing" the right people for this legislative "review".

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, Switzerland decriminalized "piracy" for self-use (i.e. cannot sell pirated materials) as perfectly fucking fine... and nothing bad has happened.

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[DickBreath]

While I think the MPAA / RIAA efforts are misplaced, at least they are focusing on the pirate sites instead of everyone else. Like mass lawsuits / extortion letters / settlements with individual downloaders. That approach sure won the hearts and minds of potential customers. Or going after Google because (in their delusional thinking) Google IS the intarwebs, and controls piracy. Or removing Google's links to pirate sites somehow magically makes the piracy disappear. Not even realizing that there are other search engines. Or that people discover the pirate sites by other means than Google. Or realizing that Google might have been a helpful tool to discover pirate sites. And the MPAA / RIAA going after individual online posts of mere links to infringing material. Free clue: If you take down the infringing material, the link becomes irrelevant -- including the hundred additional links that you don't even know about. Then there is the clueless attempts to shut down entire sites, or even entire domains containing multiple sites, over one infringing link -- and thinking this is somehow okay. No concept of the economic damage the MPAA / RIAA is causing. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.

Going after the actual pirate sites is a step in the right direction. It only took these imbeciles ten friggin' years to figure it out. That said, I will still snicker out loud every time I read about pirate sites evading the RIAA / MPAA. I don't visit any pirate sites. But I am far more sympathetic to them than to the RIAA / MPAA.

Finally, some of these 'pirate sites' are not actually pirate sites at all. Megaupload, for example. Sometimes the RIAA / MPAA goes after an entire 'technology'. Like suing Diamond Rio for making one of the first mp3 player devices! Or the ridiculous Megaupload raid because some people used it for copyright infringement.

It would be off topic to mention things like Hollywood Accounting, or how record labels screw over artists, or "collection societies" which are nothing more than extortion rackets -- sometimes trying to "collect" on music that they don't even represent. Or the stretching the bounds of copyright beyond recognition, such as playing the radio in an auto mechanic garage counts as a public performance and needs an expensive annual license. So I won't mention those things, since they are off topic.

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[muffen]

This was the result of an "investigation" asked for by the goverment, and the reason for treating large-scale copyright infringement more harshly is because the rules in Sweden mean that the police are very limited in what they can do, if they crime in question cannot end with a prison sentence of minimum 2 years.
Combined with that, the recent case against "Swefilmer" shows that they made euro 1 400 000 from advertisement, so they goverment feels that slapping a fine on an operation such as swefilmer is not sufficient.

Not sure if this is the right approach, but I don't disagree with harsh punishment for people that turn pirating into business.

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[Phusion]

a.i. capone

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[wardrich86]

My fave part of the whole DMCA Google thing is that now it's really easy to find what you wanted. Just click the DMCA note at the bottom of your search, and it shows all the sites removed c/o the DMCA. Those are probably the droids you're looking for.

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[TimothyHollins]

If you were to "borrow" my stuff, I would no longer have it. If you were to use my bed, I would no longer have access to it (unless I wanted to spoon, but I imagine you have a potent odour). On the other hand, if you were to listen in on me playing the cello, it wouldn't harm me at all while (hopefully) educating you.

The most perplexing thing is this -

Mmmm.... hey.... give me that research report you wrote up, I want to use it too. Heck, I'm not hurting anyone when I use your work.

Do you not know how the current academic system works? You are more than welcome to my research - it directly benefits me when you use it. Your ignorance regarding this matter is quite illuminating.

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[johanw]

Not only the last couple of years. Sweden already showed to be very helpfull to enforce US copyright trolls like scientology in the 1990's: see https://culteducation.com/grou...

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[CrimsonAvenger]

Combined with that, the recent case against "Swefilmer" shows that they made euro 1 400 000 from advertisement, so they goverment feels that slapping a fine on an operation such as swefilmer is not sufficient.

Prolly not, as is. On the other hand, if the fine were Euro 2 000 000.....

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[gweihir]

The process was a bit differently though: First, the government commissioned an independent scientific study, i.e. one done by actual reputable scientists, not industry lobbyists and the like. That showed what everybody not utterly dumb already knows: Piracy hurts the big artists somewhat (they still have large profits), but is a boon for the small ones, because they get exposure and more customers that way. Overall, the study concluded that the second effect is a bit stronger than the former and that the gain for diversity in the performing arts affected is huge. They also found that market failure (as is common with large monopolies), i.e. unavailability of reasonable offers, is a key factor in media piracy and that is for the market to fix, not the law.

As a result, (and probably because any respective laws have to be ratified by the population, fat chance of that), downloading for your own use is legally tolerated.
 

Re:Wow, Al Capone is now == Pirate Bay

[Insanity Defense]

While I think the MPAA / RIAA efforts are misplaced, at least they are focusing on the pirate sites instead of everyone else. Like mass lawsuits / extortion letters / settlements with individual downloaders. That approach sure won the hearts and minds of potential customers.

I think you missed a key word.

While I think the MPAA / RIAA efforts are misplaced, at least they are NOW focusing on the pirate sites instead of everyone else. Like mass lawsuits / extortion letters / settlements with individual downloaders. That approach sure won the hearts and minds of potential customers.

That makes it more accurate as it was ignoring the RIAA phase of suing / threatening to sue people till they gave in and paid up regardless of guilt.

Re:Eh

[Z80a]

Unless we're talking about a really weird circumcision where they actually encode a serial number during the cutting, only the number tattooed can be used to track you.

Baltic sea?

[davidwr]

Mobile pirate sites in Swedish waters are already subject to Swedish law.

I'm pretty sure it's already a felony.

Re:Eh

[wardrich86]

One you give away, the other you take with you.

Scoff Laws and Fair Play

[MountainLogic]

I'm all in favor of dealing with those who make a profession out of breaking the law, but the the basis of those laws must be reasonable. Clearly though, IP litigators have been give the keys to the kingdom and free reign to make their own laws. Culture is not an IP. And fair use has always been a key point of IP law that historically rests on perpetual ownership of an instance (book/record/disk/painting/etc) of that IP. Licensing IP for a limited time to people as you would to another company is unconscionable and those that do deserve the push back and pain they are getting.

Figuring out the question first is vital in stats

[emj]

Did you know that in the last 15 years there is a very high correlation between the rate of margarine consumption and the divorce rate in Maine, so obviously we if we want to protect children from divorce we should ban margarine (which is a french invention anyways).

20 years and there's still no solid evidence...

[Roger Wilcox]

20 years later and there's still no solid evidence that online "piracy" actually financially harms anybody.

Information wants to be free and that is never going to change. How many times do we have to go over this?

Re:20 years and there's still no solid evidence...

[Locke2005]

Like global warming being increased by carbon dioxide releases, it pretty much makes sense that it would have _some_ effect. Even though 95% or so that get it free probably would just go without if they had to pay for it.

Pirate punishment?

[Locke2005]

I'd recommend keelhauling them!

Re:Backwards

[gweihir]

DRM represents a market failure. If good-quality offers without DRM are available, profits time and again turn out to be entirely fine. Enough people are willing to pay to keep the artists afloat nicely. It is just the bad-quality offerings, the over-priced ones, the ones not available that "need" DRM. DRM is a technology that serves only to create artificial scarcity, and that is universally evil.

Internet to Sweden! Come in, Sweden!

[CanEHdian]

In case Sweden hasn't been paying attention, the Hollywood backed President together with his Best-Buddies-With-MPAA-Boss-VP are out the door. What they have now is a President that has been treated by Hollywood (right or wrong doesn't matter) with utter contempt and disrespect. So what happens if those same people come begging for "strengthening IP protections" and the usual demands? Stop kissing up the boss's behind for now.