In the blue corner, top prosecutors armed with a 20 month police investigation and the heavy 4000 page complaint previously mentioned earlier on/. (downloadable btw on, you guessed it, TPB). In the red corner the four defendants spearheaded by Peter Althin, one of Sweden absolute top lawyers.
...and not to mention the media making this their cover story. The fight is on.
This might be the time to try the swedish gaming monopoly to the european court. Where do I place my bet?
This ruling will possibly have a huge impact in Sweden. This summer a proposition was introduced by the government to force ISPs to release IP adresses of suspected file sharers. The argument was that EU law required such a law, and that's clearly not the case now.
Under swedish law you need the equivalent af a search warrant in able to obtain a users IP address and that will only be issued for criminal offenses, with a maximum penalty of two years in jail, or more. That is not the case with file sharing as of now and even if it was, that would only grant the Swedish police those powers. The new law would make it possible for private groups like Antipiratbyrån (the swedish version of RIAA) and other organizations to demand IP-adresses of suspected file sharers from ISPs, just like in the US. However that law is proving controversial with some MPs from the main party in the swedish government coalition, signing an article in one of Sweden's largest newspaper, demanding scrapping of this law and legalizing file sharing for private use (that has been described here on/. before).
Exiting times indeed in Sweden with growing fears about privacy, the influence of swedish and american record companies and the impending trial of The Pirate Bay.
I live in Sweden where I pay about $ 60 a month for unlimited calls, text- and multimedia messages. I would never go back to paying a per-minute-fee for making calls (and a certainly wouldn't ever accept paying for incoming calls except perhaps if I'm abroad). I know many Swedes would agree to this and the fixed pricing structure is gaining ground rapidly over here.
What business model will Apple use in Sweden and the other nordic countries with similar pricing structures?
I do agree with you. Censorship is not the solution to hatred and racism. However if a where to censor anything it sure as hell wouldn't let big business decide what's ok and what's not.
It's quite amusing to read piles of comments bashing Sweden's lack of free speech. At least we don't have a system that allows you to spread nazi-propaganda all you want, while allowing big companies to slap individuals with take down notices whenever something is posted that they did not intend for the public. If a where to pick a battle, I would not feel that sorry for us Swedes because we live in a country where posting 22 tips to get a good price on a computer is ok, and promoting holocaust is not.
I always do that and it really works! People will realise that if they think hard enough they actually have a slim chance of solving their own problems themselves. Amazing!
A lot of the problems attributed to E-mail nowadays have to do with spam. Since I started using E-mail regularly, some ten years ago something has changed. No, I'm not talking about the amount of spam but the "quality" so to speak. Half of the spam e-mail a receive is totaly unreadable. I sometimes can't understand what they want from me even if I try. Most often they want money obviously but what they are trying to get me to buy is often beond comprehension. What is the point of such an E-mail and how do they make money form it? Is it the really intelegent people that sovles the crypto and get rewarded with cheep penis enlargement treatments and viagra?
The funniest thing is that even the unreadable spam e-mail gets caugt by the thunderbird junk filter! My e-mail application obviously understands the content of the message better than I do! Amazing agan!
There is definitely an iPhone on the drawing board since Apples own Phil Shiller (senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing) has already all but confirmed it. In a conferance call resently he told investors and media representatives that music phones aren't ready to compete with iPod now, but that is likely to change in the future. Apple is 'not sitting around doing nothing.'
Sooner or later there will be an apple branded phone but I doubt it will be any time soon. I have however been wrong before...;-)
Dont forget application interoperability. It only took one win-only application that I needed to run and the Mac was out of the picture. That was for a long time, a much larger issue that price for many of us. In the days before the intel-mac and Boot Camp that is...
I totally agree! When I go to to the movies I want to see a movie not own it... same thing when a visit the video store (online or IRL). You'd have to watch all movies in average 5 times or something like that in order to be better of buying a movie as opposed to renting it. Who wants to do that?
It's not hard to understand why Jobs so desperately want people to buy things from the iTML as opposed to renting them. Once you started "buying" music and videos from iTMS you are stuck with it and that offcource, is a sweet equaition for apple.
Ohh so sorry, you need to have a law reguarding 'facilitating' copywrite violations.
Sweden doesn't have one. That's why it's legal.
Unfortunatly we do. Since copyright violation can result in a prison sentence (SFS 1960:729 53 par.), you can also be responsible for assisting in breaking copyright law (SFS 1962:700 (Brottsbalken) 23 kap, 4 par.)
I wish I was wrong, but sadly thats not the case...
NJA 1960:729, (The swedish copyright law)
NJA 1962:700, 23 kap 2 (about assisting in commiting a crime)
NJA 2005:359 (Recent addition to the copyright law about computer programs, DRM and other related topics)
Correct. Exept that they will probably NOT be charged with violating copyright law, but with assisting in breakting said law. What the prosecutors will have to prove is that, unlike google, TPB had intention in helping people breake the law.
And here is where the trouble starts. It will be VERY hard for the owners of a website that is called "the pirate bay" to argue that they have no knowlage of piracy and copyright law violation with the help of their site. To make matters worse they published letters from companies asking them to remove copyrighted material. This proves they knew about piracy, did nothing about it and hence where in fact helping people in breaking the law.
The only real challenge for the police and prosecutors will be finding a specific person that they helped. That is, someone that downloaded copyrighted material using a torrent-file (that the crew of TPB knew was illegal due to copyright infridegement letters they recived) downloaded from TPB. This is what it will boil down to in court.
This piece of legislation is very new in sweden (2005) and have only been tested a few times, in very unsimular cases. (Two guys where fined for using DC++ to download movies). The outcome is higly uncertain but I tend to beleve that sadly they will be convicted. I'm not an expert in this area but i wouldn't be suprised to find that I'm the only one in this forum that have actually studied law in sweden.
It is illegal in sweden to assist anyone in breaking the copyright law and that is exactly what they are doing. However they would get away with it for the same reason that google gets away with "assisting" people in breaking the same laws, if there was a lack of intent. This is were the name, logo, and all their statements comes in to the picture. I think you would have a very week case in court, arguing that they didnt deliberatly help people with distributing material that they know is copyrighted.
Its much harder to get away with bending the rules and finding loopholes in sweden than in the USA. Judges will simply ask them selves if the intention behind the site is (perhaps among other things) to help people violate the copyright laws. TBP can hardly argue that they didnt know anyting about piracy. None will buy that, hence they could be in trouble.
Their rescue could be the problem of finding a specific violation i.e a file they knew was illegal and still provided a torrent for. Their list of legal threats could give the prosecutors a good start though...
Under Swedish law, what matters is your intentions in the act that constitutes a crime. Google or my electrical company has no specific intention in helping me breake the law. In the case of The pirate bay on the other hand you would IMHO have trouble arguing that they has no intention in helping people violate copyright laws. Exibit A, there logo, Exibit B, their name, Exib... eh, you get the picture.
The ZDNet article made it sound to average Joe's like his out of the box OS X machine could be hacked within minutes, witout making an effort to explain that this depends on the fact that you manually have to let the hacker in first (The hacker then gets in a little futher, which of course is a big problem to, but still a slightly smaller one). The challenge was in my view a greate way to criticize a piece of lousy journalism, not an interesting test in itself.
First of all Ford bought "Volvo Personvagnar" (the consumer car manufacturing unit of volvo) and that was a smaller part of the Volvo group.
Secondly, to make Sweden non dependant on fosil fuel is NOT equivalent to banning fosil fuel. Having a few older cars running on traditional gazoline doesnt make the country dependant.
Simple economics it is, as long as a company has a right to charge more. In some cases they don't.
It could be argued that preventing people from other parts of the EU to buy things from say iTunes music store in Germany for no other reason than to charge more in another part of the EU, is in breach of the EU legislation on free trade. Companies within the EU does not have the right to stop people from buying their products in another part of the EU.
To compare differences on pricing between the US and UK to differences within the EU is irrelevant. The EU is a single market just like the US, so in this case it's more like if Apple would charge you differently should you live in California or in New Jersey.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed.
In the blue corner, top prosecutors armed with a 20 month police investigation and the heavy 4000 page complaint previously mentioned earlier on /. (downloadable btw on, you guessed it, TPB). In the red corner the four defendants spearheaded by Peter Althin, one of Sweden absolute top lawyers.
This might be the time to try the swedish gaming monopoly to the european court. Where do I place my bet?
This ruling will possibly have a huge impact in Sweden. This summer a proposition was introduced by the government to force ISPs to release IP adresses of suspected file sharers. The argument was that EU law required such a law, and that's clearly not the case now.
Under swedish law you need the equivalent af a search warrant in able to obtain a users IP address and that will only be issued for criminal offenses, with a maximum penalty of two years in jail, or more. That is not the case with file sharing as of now and even if it was, that would only grant the Swedish police those powers. The new law would make it possible for private groups like Antipiratbyrån (the swedish version of RIAA) and other organizations to demand IP-adresses of suspected file sharers from ISPs, just like in the US. However that law is proving controversial with some MPs from the main party in the swedish government coalition, signing an article in one of Sweden's largest newspaper, demanding scrapping of this law and legalizing file sharing for private use (that has been described here on /. before).
Exiting times indeed in Sweden with growing fears about privacy, the influence of swedish and american record companies and the impending trial of The Pirate Bay.
Aha! Thats why the internet is such a great sounding idea, since its nothing but a set of tubes!
I live in Sweden where I pay about $ 60 a month for unlimited calls, text- and multimedia messages. I would never go back to paying a per-minute-fee for making calls (and a certainly wouldn't ever accept paying for incoming calls except perhaps if I'm abroad). I know many Swedes would agree to this and the fixed pricing structure is gaining ground rapidly over here.
What business model will Apple use in Sweden and the other nordic countries with similar pricing structures?
I wonder when Apple will start selling those cheep easy to use space shuttles that I keep reading about on the rumor sites.
I do agree with you. Censorship is not the solution to hatred and racism. However if a where to censor anything it sure as hell wouldn't let big business decide what's ok and what's not.
It's quite amusing to read piles of comments bashing Sweden's lack of free speech. At least we don't have a system that allows you to spread nazi-propaganda all you want, while allowing big companies to slap individuals with take down notices whenever something is posted that they did not intend for the public. If a where to pick a battle, I would not feel that sorry for us Swedes because we live in a country where posting 22 tips to get a good price on a computer is ok, and promoting holocaust is not.
I always do that and it really works! People will realise that if they think hard enough they actually have a slim chance of solving their own problems themselves. Amazing!
A lot of the problems attributed to E-mail nowadays have to do with spam. Since I started using E-mail regularly, some ten years ago something has changed. No, I'm not talking about the amount of spam but the "quality" so to speak. Half of the spam e-mail a receive is totaly unreadable. I sometimes can't understand what they want from me even if I try. Most often they want money obviously but what they are trying to get me to buy is often beond comprehension. What is the point of such an E-mail and how do they make money form it? Is it the really intelegent people that sovles the crypto and get rewarded with cheep penis enlargement treatments and viagra?
The funniest thing is that even the unreadable spam e-mail gets caugt by the thunderbird junk filter! My e-mail application obviously understands the content of the message better than I do! Amazing agan!
There is definitely an iPhone on the drawing board since Apples own Phil Shiller (senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing) has already all but confirmed it. In a conferance call resently he told investors and media representatives that music phones aren't ready to compete with iPod now, but that is likely to change in the future. Apple is 'not sitting around doing nothing.' Sooner or later there will be an apple branded phone but I doubt it will be any time soon. I have however been wrong before... ;-)
Dont forget application interoperability. It only took one win-only application that I needed to run and the Mac was out of the picture. That was for a long time, a much larger issue that price for many of us. In the days before the intel-mac and Boot Camp that is...
I totally agree! When I go to to the movies I want to see a movie not own it... same thing when a visit the video store (online or IRL). You'd have to watch all movies in average 5 times or something like that in order to be better of buying a movie as opposed to renting it. Who wants to do that?
It's not hard to understand why Jobs so desperately want people to buy things from the iTML as opposed to renting them. Once you started "buying" music and videos from iTMS you are stuck with it and that offcource, is a sweet equaition for apple.
The WTO would go w00t and WTF, then tell the EU to RTFM, the one on international trade that is...
Ohh so sorry, you need to have a law reguarding 'facilitating' copywrite violations. Sweden doesn't have one. That's why it's legal.
Unfortunatly we do. Since copyright violation can result in a prison sentence (SFS 1960:729 53 par.), you can also be responsible for assisting in breaking copyright law (SFS 1962:700 (Brottsbalken) 23 kap, 4 par.)
I wish I was wrong, but sadly thats not the case...
As requested...
NJA 1960:729, (The swedish copyright law)
NJA 1962:700, 23 kap 2 (about assisting in commiting a crime)
NJA 2005:359 (Recent addition to the copyright law about computer programs, DRM and other related topics)
Correct. Exept that they will probably NOT be charged with violating copyright law, but with assisting in breakting said law. What the prosecutors will have to prove is that, unlike google, TPB had intention in helping people breake the law.
And here is where the trouble starts. It will be VERY hard for the owners of a website that is called "the pirate bay" to argue that they have no knowlage of piracy and copyright law violation with the help of their site. To make matters worse they published letters from companies asking them to remove copyrighted material. This proves they knew about piracy, did nothing about it and hence where in fact helping people in breaking the law.
The only real challenge for the police and prosecutors will be finding a specific person that they helped. That is, someone that downloaded copyrighted material using a torrent-file (that the crew of TPB knew was illegal due to copyright infridegement letters they recived) downloaded from TPB. This is what it will boil down to in court.
This piece of legislation is very new in sweden (2005) and have only been tested a few times, in very unsimular cases. (Two guys where fined for using DC++ to download movies). The outcome is higly uncertain but I tend to beleve that sadly they will be convicted. I'm not an expert in this area but i wouldn't be suprised to find that I'm the only one in this forum that have actually studied law in sweden.
Your missing the point.
It is illegal in sweden to assist anyone in breaking the copyright law and that is exactly what they are doing. However they would get away with it for the same reason that google gets away with "assisting" people in breaking the same laws, if there was a lack of intent. This is were the name, logo, and all their statements comes in to the picture. I think you would have a very week case in court, arguing that they didnt deliberatly help people with distributing material that they know is copyrighted.
Its much harder to get away with bending the rules and finding loopholes in sweden than in the USA. Judges will simply ask them selves if the intention behind the site is (perhaps among other things) to help people violate the copyright laws. TBP can hardly argue that they didnt know anyting about piracy. None will buy that, hence they could be in trouble.
Their rescue could be the problem of finding a specific violation i.e a file they knew was illegal and still provided a torrent for. Their list of legal threats could give the prosecutors a good start though...
Under Swedish law, what matters is your intentions in the act that constitutes a crime. Google or my electrical company has no specific intention in helping me breake the law. In the case of The pirate bay on the other hand you would IMHO have trouble arguing that they has no intention in helping people violate copyright laws. Exibit A, there logo, Exibit B, their name, Exib... eh, you get the picture.
I think that you are missing the point.
The ZDNet article made it sound to average Joe's like his out of the box OS X machine could be hacked within minutes, witout making an effort to explain that this depends on the fact that you manually have to let the hacker in first (The hacker then gets in a little futher, which of course is a big problem to, but still a slightly smaller one). The challenge was in my view a greate way to criticize a piece of lousy journalism, not an interesting test in itself.
First of all Ford bought "Volvo Personvagnar" (the consumer car manufacturing unit of volvo) and that was a smaller part of the Volvo group.
Secondly, to make Sweden non dependant on fosil fuel is NOT equivalent to banning fosil fuel. Having a few older cars running on traditional gazoline doesnt make the country dependant.
Simple economics it is, as long as a company has a right to charge more. In some cases they don't.
It could be argued that preventing people from other parts of the EU to buy things from say iTunes music store in Germany for no other reason than to charge more in another part of the EU, is in breach of the EU legislation on free trade. Companies within the EU does not have the right to stop people from buying their products in another part of the EU.
To compare differences on pricing between the US and UK to differences within the EU is irrelevant. The EU is a single market just like the US, so in this case it's more like if Apple would charge you differently should you live in California or in New Jersey.