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

[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

[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

[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

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

[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

[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.

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?