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Pirate Bay Raid Investigation Finished
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 02, 2007 01:11 PM
from the casting-a-wide-net dept.
from the casting-a-wide-net dept.
A Pirate writes "The Swedish Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has finished the investigation of the Pirate Bay raid where close to 200 servers were confiscated. Just a fragment of these were actually Pirate Bay's and this led to both the police and prosecutor being charged with official misconduct, but the judges dropped the cases. In the report published by the JO he concludes that the judges were right, but there is also some very interesting information about how the MPA, IFPI and the American embassy tried to push the Swedish Minister of Justice and Secretary of State into influencing the police and the prosecutor to act upon The Pirate Bay."
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There is a precedent for US internet meddling (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There is a precedent for US internet meddling (Score:4, Funny)
Oh but they are trying. If they gain control of the root DNS servers they are going to fucking ruin the Internet as we know it.
Parent
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny, because some american politician are pathetic how they try to actually take over the net.
If anything happen to the root DNS, the history will just follow the same path it did with any open-source or other open- projects : fork.
Just like when CDDB2 became comercial, poeple just switched to freedb.org (which contained the last public copy of the data), if the root DNS gets pwned by politicians with agenda, most probably a couple of alternative server will emerge. And because this i
There is a difference between... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:There is a difference between... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yes I do... I mean
Parent
Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
If I owned a site that was taken down for the crime of using the same host as TPB, I'd be assembling a team of rabid attack lawyers, and training them to go for the wallet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)
I thought that was an innate ability of all lawyers. Attacking the govenernment with little chance of seeing hard cash - now that would take some real training. If you could do that and manage to train them to ignore the money in your wallet - now that would be quite a trick!
Parent
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to train lawyers to go for the wallet, that's the instinct that makes them lawyers in the first place.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your comment is as much crying wolf as that of any RIAA lawyer.
Parent
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a lot of TPB cases we're not talking about $0.99 per song either, but about somebody who would rather not pay $700 for Photoshop. Maybe Adobe wouldn't have gotten the money, but it's very possible that MacroMedia (bought JASC) is out the $150 they get for Paintshop as an alternative. So even though there is no monetary damage to Adobe, somebody else also loses a sale.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
In the case of music, you might have a point, but mine is that no one can prove that anyone has lost money, only that it looks like it. If in fact there were no free downloads of any kind I wonder what they would blame
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
You dont own PaintShopPro 7, you license it. This is a key distinction that many people forget.
Parent
As usual... (Score:5, Insightful)
So let's say the recording industry has 150,000 copies of Brittany's Greatest Hits on the shelf, and someone makes a digital copy of same. How many copies does the recording industry have? 150,000 -- just like when they started.
So when you come up with a way to make a copy of a Corvette on a car dealer's lot, but leave the original one there on the lot, you will have an analogous situation. Otherwise you've fallen into the trap of equating copyright violations with theft, the very mistake the *IAA are trying to talk everyone into.
Parent
Re:As usual... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. But if they had 150,000 copies, and 150,000 people ready to purchase, and one makes that digital copy, now they can only sell 149,999 -- they are left with one copy.
No, from the start they didn't have "150,000" copies. They had one master copy, and a potentially infinite number of digital copies to sell. The cost of producing the master copy has nothing to do with the number of copies sold. So, who decided that the "number of people willing to buy" was 150,000?
The missing piece is this: price. They had, say, 50,000 willing to buy at $1, another 50,000 willing to buy at $0.50, and another willing to buy for $0 (that is, willing to download and listen to the song - not the same as someone who just doesn't like the song, or movie or whatever).
Although it might seem like that last group adds no benefit to the recording industry, that's not the case. Those people might tell others about the song ($billions are spent on advertising every year - so you can't just ignore the value of this), or the might go to concerts, or they might by other merchandise which is not digitally reproducible (you can't download a Metallica t-shirt, at least not without investing some time and equipment in printing your own).
So - no problem if everyone buys at the price they're willing to pay. This is an example of "differentiated pricing", which is taught about in an introductory economics course as a good thing, something industries strive for (examples cited in your textbook will be "child tickets" for movies and events). The only problem is if the people willing to pay $1 get the song for free instead. (Back to the original point - this is the only source of "lost revenue" due to piracy in the equation).
This problem is easily addressed as follows: those people who are willing to pay more place a value on their own time. To them, the opportunity cost of spending 20 minutes to look for a torrent is more than paying $1. Thus, they would rather spend 2 minutes and pay $1 to get the song than spend 20 minutes and get it for free. It might seem hard to believe such people exist if you're not one of them, but believe me they do. These people pay $3 for a bottle of spring water at the service station instead of walking to the supermarket next door and buying the same thing for $1.50 (and there's nothing wrong with that - just pointing out the non-digital analogy in this logic).
To a rational person it would then seem the solution is to provide an option that allows them to do this. The more business minded people of the world (eg. Apple) have already done this, with great success. If I can explain this in 5 minutes, it can't be difficult to understand. So why is the RIAA still not putting their efforts into this wholesale? Well, I guess you all know the answer to that question.
As for a site going down as 'collateral' for being hosted at the same datacenter as some illegal site, this is definitely grounds to sue for compensation. An online business that relies on its website as a primary sales channel loses all the sales they would have made that day if the site is taken down - this is the reason that SLAs even exist. To take the car analogy up again: let's say you bought a (completely legit) Corvette from a dealer. Later (or earlier), unbeknownst to you, the dealer (had) sold a stolen Corvette to someone else. As a result, your Corvette is siezed by police. Reasonable? I think not.
Parent
Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a nice breakdown. Another difference between material objects and copyable files is that there's a sort of coercive element to the material -- we've got it, if you want it, you gotta pay what we're asking. Files can, with some effort, be gotten for free. The value of the commercial product is in quality of the files and overall packaging, as well as ease of access. These are things worth paying for, even if you could get the content for free, though as you outline, what people are willing to pay
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't logic, this is marketing. It's PR that Intellectual Property interests (BSA, RIAA, MPAA, etc) have been working on for quite some time. It simply doesn't hold up to rational discourse. Monetary damages due to pirated intellectual property are nothing but myth. And as community-shared intellectual property matures, the myth just becomes more and more absurd.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If and only if you truly never ever would pay for anything, even if you were unable to pirate anything, would that is true. If tomorrow you couldn't pirate Windows, MS Office, Photoshop or any other software and every piece of pirated software you have is gone, would you go cold turkey and use only Linux, OpenOffice and GIMP? Or would you pay for a legitimate version of something, which is t
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
What did you expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Police and prosecutor should be prosecuted. (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is why the police and prosecutor will continue to break the law. This happens everywhere, unless the police are required to actually obey the law, there is no incentive to. Even when they are punished, it generally amounts to a slap on the wrist.
The police can and will arrest people who have done nothing wrong (I and a number of others at a protest during the Forbes conference in Sydney in 2005 for example, all the charges were either dropped or thrown out of court, except those people who pleaded guilty).
It isn't just illegal raids or arrests either. In Queensland an Aboriginal man was killed while in police custody. It was latter shown that he shouldn't have even been arrested, and that he was beaten to death. The police officer responsible continues in his duties (though he has been transferred from Palm Island). Actually, apparently he has now been charged, with manslaughter, after a former NSW chief judge examined the evidence.
(See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Island,_Queensl
So, it is obvious that the police need to be held accountable for their actions. While it is possible in most places to sue them (in the civil court), and this is what the various owners and users of these seized servers should do, the judge often finds that the police "were just doing their duty". No they fucking weren't! They were going beyond their duty.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Police and prosecutor should be prosecuted. (Score:4, Interesting)
The case where I did provide evidence to the contrary, I only found out that the cop was being charged after looking for information on the case. And it was only after an independent person examined the evidence.
Also, as a comment somewhere above points out, in Sweden you basically have no recourse when suing the government. The another comment in the same thread talks about the Steve Jackson games case.
As to your question about the police and prosecutors. I simply quoted that from the summary. But they work together. The police arrest you and attempt to find evidence to convict you, the prosecutor attempts to convict you. They both have an interest in having guilty verdicts.
Parent
If the 10 Commandments were a "Living Document"... (Score:4, Funny)
If the Ten Commandments [wikipedia.org] were a "living document" (as some claim, US Constitution ought to be), it would've been found to contain the "Thou shall not violate copyrights" by now...
Synzronvg zl nff...
Re:If the 10 Commandments were a "Living Document" (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Constitution of the United States is a "living" document. However, that said, the amount of life in it is only equal to the interest of the People of the United States in maintaining and safeguarding it. The Federal Government's task is to interpret the will of the people and create consensus (not just majority rule), the modify the document accordingly. This has been done in the past to rectify the injustice of slavery, provide women their given right to vote, and even to limit the power of the President of the United States by limiting the number of terms possible to serve in the office to two.
If there's a problem with a "living" document, it's that it has been alive so long, that provisions contained within it have outlived their original intent and have not "evolved" to stay current with the progress of society. I think it's safe to say this is true of a great many non-Constitutional laws as well. I think a new breath of life needs to be applied to the Constitution if it is to continue to server the people in this century and those to come.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What the Constitution says should be the law, not what people say it says.
The problem with that is, just whose definitions do you use? The Constitution, like any written document, is subject to interpretation simply because while individual words have a limited range of meaning, their many and varied combinations can be interpreted along a wide spectrum. That's why we have a court system: to try and create a reasonable definition of a law in any given circumstance. Two opposing sides in an argument will generally insist on an interpretation biased toward their definitions. It's
They do this all the time (Score:5, Informative)
I got into a debate about this with a friend (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like the man won (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, this sounds like hassling that has worked against TPB.
You host TPB servers. We will just randomly take the servers to the police station and shut down your business for weeks. And, you can't touch us with misconduct charges or anything.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In response to the pressure... (Score:4, Funny)
Swedish Constitutional Law 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened with the raid on Pirate Bay could very well be a constitutional offense. That is of course after the Committee on the Constitution have properly investigated it. This is serious business.
Yanking 186 servers for a week is not misconduct? (Score:5, Informative)
FTA: "...a total of 186 servers were confiscated from PRQ's server rooms. This led to that a big number of companies and a lot of small and large websites lost their servers and in many cases their primary livelihood. ...It took them over a week before they decided to give back some of the servers that was not related to Pirate Bay."
If this were in the U.S., all the affected businesses would probably sue the government over lost revenue. Alternatively (or additionally) they would sue PRQ for co-hosting them with known criminals that made them vulnerable to such police action. Then they would sue the vendor who made PRQ's servers (e.g. Dell or whoever).
And now for TPB's reaction (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey Swödige ! Act up !! (Score:5, Funny)
Why yes, we are. It's a long Swedish tradition to be herded by idiots.
Parent
Re:Hey Swödige ! Act up !! (Score:5, Funny)
Defendant, goes home, gets a job and returns to a steady bill payer's lifestyle.
The RIAA . . . well . . .
Nevermind. I really don't care what happens to them.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And here in America, the government is officially by, of and for the people.
Any other spectacularly ignorant insights you want to share with us?
Re:I disagree with the tactics. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course they will. They just won't be sold on DVD.
But do you think it's likely that that will happen?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The question that people need to think about is "We have the power. Should we use it?" This was done in the 1980's for the Apple platform - nobody produced games for this after around 1984 or so because pirate BBS were so prevalent that it was impossible to make any money selling a game. The same can be done for DVD movies.
It can also be done for music. Books are a little hard
Re:I disagree with the tactics. (Score:4, Informative)
You may find MobyGames [mobygames.com] enlightening on the subject.
Over a hundred games were produced for the Apple][ after 1987.
The only problem was that the *good* games at the time were either being produced for the major game consoles (for the superior interface and faster load times), arcade machines (greatly enhanced power and graphics), or the PC (far greater home market saturation.)
So in short, your point on video games is completely off-base.
Finally, there's no way in hell that net piracy could at any time in the near future make it unprofitable to sell video - even if it were legalized - for the simple reason that the downloads are nonpermanent (even if you burn them), not easily loaned to friends, prohibitively slow (hours to download a movie, faster to get to the video rental store), and nontechnical people can't do it easily (and we've seen that most nontechnical people don't like doing ANYTHING that isn't easy - including voting.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hollywood vs. Sealand (Score:4, Insightful)
Given their budgets they could also hire some mercenaries and mount an attack on Sealand themselves.
If they filmed it they might make a profit on it, too.
Copyright (c) 2007 by me writing as "Ungrounded Lightning Rod".
Leave a followup to any posting in my journal with a firm offer if you want to do the movie. Otherwise I may sue for copyright infringement if such an attack is made, filmed, and the film shown for profit - even on a news operation under the same umbrella corporation. B-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not waco. No one died, a bunch of computers got seized... Sadly no one cares no matter how many rights are brought up.