The video shows that the police covers up the cameras, so they most likely wanted to hide something during the raid. And I guess that they forgot that they were in a high-security hosting facility - most likely the swedish secret police is p*ssed at them for covering the cameras.
They are liable for any damages, including downtime for legal services. They have publicly confirmed that after the raid.
And most likely they will end up paying big time. Instead of just taking TPB's servers as the warrant allowed, they took all servers hosted by the same hosting provider. Most likely to make an (illegal) example, trying to make the hosting provider go bankrupt and instill fear in other hosting providers. About 200 legitimate businesses in Sweden are down right now because of this.
It is my impression that in Scandinavia there is a growing awareness of these issues, in particular in the young voter population.
In Sweden there has been a TV show going on for some time called Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates). In this program six young politically interested persons debated the political issues they felt important. Two days ago the show was concluded with a viewer vote, and the "candidate" with the most votes won 250,000 swedish kroner. The winner had openly supported The Pirate Bay and said that he would donate 50,000 swedish kroner to them if he won. He won with 57.8 percent of the votes.
Given the number of responses this gave, I'd better give a few more background comments.
This is in Denmark, as some have guessed. If you understand danish, you can find the legislative process for this law change documented here. Unfortunately the background for this law change (Betænkning nr. 1385/2000) is no longer online, and this is what best illustrates the US government pressure.
Basically the US government complained in the WTO that we did not obey TRIPS Article 50, 1 (b) as we did note have Anton Piller order-like legislation that could be used against individuals suspected on infringing on copyrights, although all legal experts said we were fully compliant. When the US government threathened to escalate this into trade restrictions against Denmark our government felt forced to propose this law change although they knew that we did not violate TRIPS.
This incident changed my view on the US. I have nothing against the US people, but I have developed a strong dislike for the US government (no matter which party in your two-party system is in power), and I now have a better understanding of why people in some parts of the world think the US is imperialistic and want to do terrorist action against the US.
Personally I don't want to retaliate against the US.
And I don't think it is needed. Given the way things are developing in the US and in the rest of the world, I think it is just a matter of time until the US has fallen so much technologically and economically behind the rest of the world that they will be unable to bully other nations like they did to my country. This is sad for the US people, as they have to suffer under a government by the corporations and for the corporations in a two-party political system that is only marginally better than the communist one party system.
You US people are lucky that ex parte decisions are only allowed for giving the identity of someone with a certain IP address.
A few years ago, the US government bullied my country into making new law under the threat of a trade war.
This new legislation allows copyright holders to obtain an "ex parte" court order to enter and search private homes without informing the people living in these private homes if the copyright holder can show that it is "probable" that someone living there has infringed on a copyright. There is no requirement that the police be involved in such searches of private homes (first time this has been allowed in my country), and the law gives the copyright holder a right to be present at the search (never before have the other side in a civil case been allowed to be present during a search of a private home in my country).
This has regularly been abused. In very few cases the "evidence" found in such searches has ever been used in a court of law. Instead most cases have been settled before court by the people searched in fear of the copyright holders releasing information on what was found during the search (legal or not).
I used to have a hard time understanding why some people were thinking the US was imperialistic and why the US had to be opposed in any way possible, but no longer.
Tomorrow it may be my door that the US entertainment industry kicks down.
Does somebody want to take a guess if I still like the US?
The proposed directive was simply an attempt to change the law to be closer to what the European Patent Office (EPO) is doing. EPO has changed their interpretation of Article 52 in the European Patent Convention to allow patenting just about all software and business methods.
Although the directive was defeated, this hasn't changed the behaviour of EPO. The EU Commission is unable to control them.
the only difference between agreeing and declining is that if you decline, the software is not activated (but it remains installed).
Originally it was thought that no matter if the user declined, the software would be activated. The difference was that it was thought that if the user declined the software would not be active after a reboot.
However, yesterday word came out that in some cases the software can become permanently activated even though the user declined to have it installed.
It isn't correct to assume that 91/250/EEC implicitly forbids reverse engineering when the conditions of Article 6 are not met. Please note that Article 6 is stated in the negative: "The authorization of the rightholder shall not be required where [...]".
The legal effect of this is that EU member states are not allowed to pass local laws that requires the authorization of the rightholder in the situation described in Article 6.
Member states are technically still free to pass local laws forbidding reverse engineering in other situations (like disassembling the Sony rootkit to show that it contains LAME code), but I know of no EU member states that have passed such legislation.
As for my quote of the Commission when they proposed the swpat directive in 2002, we all know that they lied and that the proposed directive did not reflect this concern. But the interesting thing in this quote is that they state that reverse engineering is considered legitimate. I'll re-quote just the relevant part:
[...] "reverse engineering" and other activities considered legitimate [...]
It is not correct to say that there exists an "interoperability exception of copyright law". Interoperability has never been covered by european copyright, and the reason for 91/250/EEC Article 6 is to ensure that copyright cannot be extended in local state law to forbid reverse engineering for the purpose of obtaining interoperability.
At least in Europe, even reverse engineering is forbidden by copyright law, except for the purpose of making software interoperable with another product.
But I know of no EU laws (or case law) forbidding reverse engineering of software, and I ought to know.
In 2002, when the EU commission proposed the software patent directive, they wrote: "The proposal therefore reflects concerns that if 'isolated' computer programs could be patented, this would blur the distinction between the scope of copyright and patent protection, and that if enforced, patents including such claims could be used to prevent "reverse engineering" and other activities considered legitimate in respect of computer programs already protected under copyright law.".
If you know of any EU law (or case law) that forbids reverse engineering of software in Europe, please let me know.
Scenario one: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone pops up with a patent and says I have to pay royalties.
Scenario two: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone else steals my idea for their own software and releases a competing product.
Both of these scenarios are clearly wrong, but no patent plan thus far has dealt with any way to prevent both cases. Overuse of software patents creates the first scenario, while lack of software patents creates the second.
You forget the effect of copright in scenario two. Somebody else cannot simply steal your software, so they have to reverse engineer it and create their own software with your idea.
Because of the time it takes to get a new piece of software on the market you will be about two years ahead of your competition.
Without software patents you cannot simply lean back and collect patent royalties for the next 20 years. To stay ahead of your competition you will be forced to keep on innovating.
So the lack of software patents actually promotes more innovation.
I don't believe there are any real (as in frequently used) legitimate reasons for P2P networks to exist other than to distribute material illegally.
I guess you haven't followed the supreme court case against Grokster, or read any of the many amicus briefs supporting the respondents because they were afraid that the supreme court could outlaw p2p. Creative commons summarized it nicely when they said "p2p networks enable a kind of protected speech that would otherwise be economically infeasible in their amucus brief.
And I don't understand why you think that Bittorrent is any different. Just like the other p2p systems Bittorrent is simply a system for copying digital files from one user to another, and just like the other systems Bittorrent is just to create both legal and illegal copies. Your points a) and b) can just as easily be applied to illegal copying with Bittorrent, and your points c) and d) are also valid with other p2p systems.
We're not demanding that Germany turn over the original printing press. We've made our own.
And this is exactly what the US government risks the rest of the world will do with the Internet if they stay unwilling to make the slighest compromise.
While the US government may not directly be controlling the core Internet resources, it is a fact that the majority of ICANN directors are US people and that ICANN is very influenced by the US department of commerce.
Of course we will not get two disconnected internets. The division will be much more subtle, at least in the beginning.
The worst problem for the rest of the world is the US control over the DNS root zone. If the US refuses to give up control over the root zone the rest of the world will likely create their own root zone running on another set of root servers. The US government may stop the creation of a.xxx TLD in the old root zone, but the rest of the world may allow it. This could create the first division: Only people using the non-US-approved root zone will be able to browse to.xxx domains.
Having two sets of root servers wouldn't be that bad, but things could be a lot worse.
If for example the allocation of the sparse IPv4 addresses are more favorably allocated to US networks, the rest of the world could start their own address allocation authority. This would mean that there would be overlaps between the IP addresses allocated by the US and the IP addresses allocated by the rest of the world. Such overlaps would mean that parts of the US internet would be inaccessible from the rest of the world.
The more power, the more bandwidth you get. This is a fundamental fact of telecommunications.
As a rule of thump (when the signal to noise ratio is high) the usable bandwidth is raised by a constant factor every time you double the power of the signal.
Not much to say about this OS until Microsoft learns how to keep their server alive during a slashdotting...
But from the second link it seems that almost everything - including user programs - executes in socalled Software Isolated Processes (SIPs), and that these SIPs all run in ring 0.
[sarcasm] Looks to me like Microsoft is working hard to keep their current security leadership... [/sarcasm]
Some years back each european country had their own rules for DST. Travelling through Europe around the times of year when changing to/from DST was hell if you wanted to know the local time.
Then EU kicked in and harmonized the rules for changing to and from DST, and this had made everything a lot easier. Even EU countries in different time zones have the same rules, so you know the time difference is always the same.
To me it really makes sense that nearby countries want to have the same rules for changing to/from DST.
In Denmark where I live, the police wanted to start using breath analyzers to prove intoxication to the court in DUI cases a few years back instead of the blood test that they have been using for years. After some public debate that project was stopped after some experts concluded that breath analyzers were not always completely accurate. Today only blood tests are used.
But here laser speed detection is widespread to catch speeders, and a very special court case comes to mind: The defendant was accused of speeding in a rural area at a speed nearly physical impossible at the place where his speed was measured with a laser. The police refused to give out any information on the device used, except for the brand and the model. The defence got hold of a copy of the operations manual for the device from an unknown source, and the police had to confirm to the court that it was the operations manual for the device used. The defendant was aquitted because the defence could show that the policeman didn't know about the warnings about reflections in the manual and the he had used it in a way that could give false results. Without the manual the defendent would have been falsely convicted.
The fact is that the market has already decided the answer to this.
And the problem with this guy is that he doesn't like what the free market has decided.
He wants laws to be passed that would make some (or all?) kinds of disclaimers on warranty and fitness for a particular purpose illegal for software.
He wants it in the name of "consumer protection", but he does not realize that the consumers are not interested in paying the higher price tags this would put on software.
The only ones whom this would really protect would be corporations big enough to buy costly insurance against claim. They would be protected against competition from Open Source software and smaller companies that would drop out of the software market because of the risk of liability.
I know this problem, and maybe this can help you and others.
JBoss guys, i really do have better things to do with my time than read through and compare 1000 lines of XML between two releases to figure this crap out. A simple "upgrade instructions" document would have been nice.
We have over a dozen JBoss configuration files that are tweaked. When we upgrade we:
Diff between the original and tweaked version of of old release.
Apply diff to original of new release to get new tweaked file.
In some cases a bit of manual work is needed, but not too often.
the reality is that the *vast* majority of those files are currently undocumented and anything anybody does with them is pure guesswork.
There is a lot of information on this in the official JBoss for-buy documentation. If you do not want to buy the official documentation, please have a look at the DTDs for the XML files, as they generally are well commented. As a last resort you can also look at the source, but personally I only had to do that once (in 5-6 upgrades).
A little over two years ago the company I work for started development of the next generation of our proprietary specialised software (big mission critical system for international corporations), with the server side running on JBoss and Oracle.
Some of the developers we hired to do the programming had experience with other J2EE implementations, and they were impressed at how much easier it was to use JBoss, in particular to find code bugs under JBoss compared to other J2EE implementations.
Now the new system is running for real, and we see uptime over 99.9% (still too early to put more 9s after the digit; our new system will have to mature first).
During the development and first deployments we only found one serious bug in JBoss: A distributed deadlock that we found because we used HA-JNDI in a very unusual way. When we told JBoss Inc. what was wrong, they had a fix for it about 12 hours later.
This project has been god for my company: We have quadrupled our revenue in the last two years, and expect to double our revenue each year for the next five years. This is mostly due to big interest in the new system from new customers, and currently we have to tell most new customers to wait, as we do not have time to take in so many new customers at once.
And it has been good for my personal wallet too. Maybe because I was the one who pushed for the use of JBoss as the platform of our new system. Today my monthly paycheck is almost the same amount as what I made each year five years ago.
Disclaimer: Several years ago I was an active developer on the JBoss project. I know several JBoss Inc. employees personally, but I am not (and never have been) affiliated with JBoss Inc. in any way except that the company I work for is a customer of JBoss Inc.
Slashdot Mirror
They are liable for any damages, including downtime for legal services. They have publicly confirmed that after the raid.
And most likely they will end up paying big time. Instead of just taking TPB's servers as the warrant allowed, they took all servers hosted by the same hosting provider . Most likely to make an (illegal) example, trying to make the hosting provider go bankrupt and instill fear in other hosting providers. About 200 legitimate businesses in Sweden are down right now because of this.
In Sweden there has been a TV show going on for some time called Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates). In this program six young politically interested persons debated the political issues they felt important. Two days ago the show was concluded with a viewer vote, and the "candidate" with the most votes won 250,000 swedish kroner. The winner had openly supported The Pirate Bay and said that he would donate 50,000 swedish kroner to them if he won. He won with 57.8 percent of the votes.
This is in Denmark, as some have guessed. If you understand danish, you can find the legislative process for this law change documented here. Unfortunately the background for this law change (Betænkning nr. 1385/2000) is no longer online, and this is what best illustrates the US government pressure.
Basically the US government complained in the WTO that we did not obey TRIPS Article 50, 1 (b) as we did note have Anton Piller order-like legislation that could be used against individuals suspected on infringing on copyrights, although all legal experts said we were fully compliant. When the US government threathened to escalate this into trade restrictions against Denmark our government felt forced to propose this law change although they knew that we did not violate TRIPS.
This incident changed my view on the US. I have nothing against the US people, but I have developed a strong dislike for the US government (no matter which party in your two-party system is in power), and I now have a better understanding of why people in some parts of the world think the US is imperialistic and want to do terrorist action against the US.
Personally I don't want to retaliate against the US.
And I don't think it is needed. Given the way things are developing in the US and in the rest of the world, I think it is just a matter of time until the US has fallen so much technologically and economically behind the rest of the world that they will be unable to bully other nations like they did to my country. This is sad for the US people, as they have to suffer under a government by the corporations and for the corporations in a two-party political system that is only marginally better than the communist one party system.
A few years ago, the US government bullied my country into making new law under the threat of a trade war.
This new legislation allows copyright holders to obtain an "ex parte" court order to enter and search private homes without informing the people living in these private homes if the copyright holder can show that it is "probable" that someone living there has infringed on a copyright. There is no requirement that the police be involved in such searches of private homes (first time this has been allowed in my country), and the law gives the copyright holder a right to be present at the search (never before have the other side in a civil case been allowed to be present during a search of a private home in my country).
This has regularly been abused. In very few cases the "evidence" found in such searches has ever been used in a court of law. Instead most cases have been settled before court by the people searched in fear of the copyright holders releasing information on what was found during the search (legal or not).
I used to have a hard time understanding why some people were thinking the US was imperialistic and why the US had to be opposed in any way possible, but no longer.
Tomorrow it may be my door that the US entertainment industry kicks down.
Does somebody want to take a guess if I still like the US?
They are trying to efficiently find a signal in random and chaotic data. Random and chaotic data isn't easy to index.
Although the directive was defeated, this hasn't changed the behaviour of EPO. The EU Commission is unable to control them.
However, yesterday word came out that in some cases the software can become permanently activated even though the user declined to have it installed.
In Denmark where I live we have special taxes for blank media.
A blank USB drive has a tax of about 66 US cent per piece, and that money goes to the music industry no matter what the drive is used for.
For blank VHS tapes the situation is even worse. Here it is quite common to find VHS tapes with movies on them at lower prices than blank tapes.
You have a point there. That is, if EULA's have any legal effect.
The legal effect of this is that EU member states are not allowed to pass local laws that requires the authorization of the rightholder in the situation described in Article 6.
Member states are technically still free to pass local laws forbidding reverse engineering in other situations (like disassembling the Sony rootkit to show that it contains LAME code), but I know of no EU member states that have passed such legislation.
As for my quote of the Commission when they proposed the swpat directive in 2002, we all know that they lied and that the proposed directive did not reflect this concern. But the interesting thing in this quote is that they state that reverse engineering is considered legitimate. I'll re-quote just the relevant part:
It is not correct to say that there exists an "interoperability exception of copyright law". Interoperability has never been covered by european copyright, and the reason for 91/250/EEC Article 6 is to ensure that copyright cannot be extended in local state law to forbid reverse engineering for the purpose of obtaining interoperability.Of course the computer programs Directive (91/250/EEC) states reverse engineering for the purpose of making software interoperable as being explicitly allowed.
But I know of no EU laws (or case law) forbidding reverse engineering of software, and I ought to know.
In 2002, when the EU commission proposed the software patent directive, they wrote: "The proposal therefore reflects concerns that if 'isolated' computer programs could be patented, this would blur the distinction between the scope of copyright and patent protection, and that if enforced, patents including such claims could be used to prevent "reverse engineering" and other activities considered legitimate in respect of computer programs already protected under copyright law.".
If you know of any EU law (or case law) that forbids reverse engineering of software in Europe, please let me know.
Because of the time it takes to get a new piece of software on the market you will be about two years ahead of your competition.
Without software patents you cannot simply lean back and collect patent royalties for the next 20 years. To stay ahead of your competition you will be forced to keep on innovating.
So the lack of software patents actually promotes more innovation.
This has also been shown in imperical research (pdf warning).
And I don't understand why you think that Bittorrent is any different. Just like the other p2p systems Bittorrent is simply a system for copying digital files from one user to another, and just like the other systems Bittorrent is just to create both legal and illegal copies. Your points a) and b) can just as easily be applied to illegal copying with Bittorrent, and your points c) and d) are also valid with other p2p systems.
While the US government may not directly be controlling the core Internet resources, it is a fact that the majority of ICANN directors are US people and that ICANN is very influenced by the US department of commerce.
Of course we will not get two disconnected internets. The division will be much more subtle, at least in the beginning.
The worst problem for the rest of the world is the US control over the DNS root zone. If the US refuses to give up control over the root zone the rest of the world will likely create their own root zone running on another set of root servers. The US government may stop the creation of a .xxx TLD in the old root zone, but the rest of the world may allow it. This could create the first division: Only people using the non-US-approved root zone will be able to browse to .xxx domains.
Having two sets of root servers wouldn't be that bad, but things could be a lot worse.
If for example the allocation of the sparse IPv4 addresses are more favorably allocated to US networks, the rest of the world could start their own address allocation authority. This would mean that there would be overlaps between the IP addresses allocated by the US and the IP addresses allocated by the rest of the world. Such overlaps would mean that parts of the US internet would be inaccessible from the rest of the world.
As a rule of thump (when the signal to noise ratio is high) the usable bandwidth is raised by a constant factor every time you double the power of the signal.
But from the second link it seems that almost everything - including user programs - executes in socalled Software Isolated Processes (SIPs), and that these SIPs all run in ring 0.
[sarcasm] Looks to me like Microsoft is working hard to keep their current security leadership... [/sarcasm]
Then EU kicked in and harmonized the rules for changing to and from DST, and this had made everything a lot easier. Even EU countries in different time zones have the same rules, so you know the time difference is always the same.
To me it really makes sense that nearby countries want to have the same rules for changing to/from DST.
For example, there is Dynekilen. A small fjord in Bohuslän, a little north of Strømstad. Dynekilen is known for a naval battle in 1716.
But here laser speed detection is widespread to catch speeders, and a very special court case comes to mind: The defendant was accused of speeding in a rural area at a speed nearly physical impossible at the place where his speed was measured with a laser. The police refused to give out any information on the device used, except for the brand and the model. The defence got hold of a copy of the operations manual for the device from an unknown source, and the police had to confirm to the court that it was the operations manual for the device used. The defendant was aquitted because the defence could show that the policeman didn't know about the warnings about reflections in the manual and the he had used it in a way that could give false results. Without the manual the defendent would have been falsely convicted.
Yeah, you don't use the metric system...
He wants laws to be passed that would make some (or all?) kinds of disclaimers on warranty and fitness for a particular purpose illegal for software.
He wants it in the name of "consumer protection", but he does not realize that the consumers are not interested in paying the higher price tags this would put on software.
The only ones whom this would really protect would be corporations big enough to buy costly insurance against claim. They would be protected against competition from Open Source software and smaller companies that would drop out of the software market because of the risk of liability.
Doesn't truth matter anymore?
- Diff between the original and tweaked version of of old release.
- Apply diff to original of new release to get new tweaked file.
In some cases a bit of manual work is needed, but not too often. There is a lot of information on this in the official JBoss for-buy documentation. If you do not want to buy the official documentation, please have a look at the DTDs for the XML files, as they generally are well commented. As a last resort you can also look at the source, but personally I only had to do that once (in 5-6 upgrades).Some of the developers we hired to do the programming had experience with other J2EE implementations, and they were impressed at how much easier it was to use JBoss, in particular to find code bugs under JBoss compared to other J2EE implementations.
Now the new system is running for real, and we see uptime over 99.9% (still too early to put more 9s after the digit; our new system will have to mature first).
During the development and first deployments we only found one serious bug in JBoss: A distributed deadlock that we found because we used HA-JNDI in a very unusual way. When we told JBoss Inc. what was wrong, they had a fix for it about 12 hours later.
This project has been god for my company: We have quadrupled our revenue in the last two years, and expect to double our revenue each year for the next five years. This is mostly due to big interest in the new system from new customers, and currently we have to tell most new customers to wait, as we do not have time to take in so many new customers at once.
And it has been good for my personal wallet too. Maybe because I was the one who pushed for the use of JBoss as the platform of our new system. Today my monthly paycheck is almost the same amount as what I made each year five years ago.
Disclaimer: Several years ago I was an active developer on the JBoss project. I know several JBoss Inc. employees personally, but I am not (and never have been) affiliated with JBoss Inc. in any way except that the company I work for is a customer of JBoss Inc.