The Pirate Bay Files Suit Against Big Media

Join the Pirate Party writes "Having found the necessary proof via the leaked MediaDefenders documents, the Pirate Bay is filing suit against the big record and movie labels operating in Sweden who have allegedly been paying professional hackers, saboteurs and DDoSers to destroy their trackers. They also claim to have filed a police report."

Finally

It's taken long enough but it seems these corporations who employ mafia-like tactics will finally get what they deserve. Kudos to the whistle-blowers within MediaDefender, The Pirate Bay for having the guts to file a lawsuit, and Sweden's Communistic copyright laws allowing this happen.

Re:Finally

It's not the copyright laws as such that are different in Sweden. They subscribe to the Berne convention like (almost) everyone else. The difference is that it is not illegal to run a tracker since it doesn't actually host any files.

I am far from an expert, but I think the basis of this is that copyright falls under contract law in Sweden, as opposed to criminal law. Helping someone commit a crime is illegal, but helping someone break a contract isn't. This is third hand knowledge though, so don't quote me on it.

There might also be a freedom of speech issue involved which would require a change to the foundational (constitutional) laws, which explains why they haven't managed to change the law to harmonize with the EU.

Re:Finally

Sir, I was talking in jest. My point was that Sweden's apparent relaxed attitude to copyright laws harks back to Marxist ideas of sharing and community-owned property.

Uh, no, a "relaxed" attitude towards copyright may merely indicate a recognition of the fact you can't "own" information like you can physical property.

Re:Finally

Are you an artist ? Have you tried to make a living out of your art without the "backing" of some RIAA-like group ? Specially early on your career.

Have you considered this is simply a reflection of how the market (society) values the production of the average "artist" ?

I'd like to know

If the suit was lodged on talk like a pirate day...

Cyberterrorists.

Using illegal tactics to shut down a legitimate site has to be cyberterrorism, right?

Animal rights activists who hack and deface sites seems to get that label. I'd find it quite hilarious if "Big Media" would be labeled as such too. They'd be in some interesting company.

.haeger

Re:Cyberterrorists.

the difference is big media pays money to the government... the real terrorists are the people who steal intellectual property and make it available for others free of charge.

i think i either saw something put out by the **AA or one of those commercials they play before movies that basically equated people who pirate music and movies to drug lords and terrorists.

Re:Cyberterrorists.

Well there are those rootkit incidents... you know, the ones one the music CDs and the games?

legality

As has already been shown, Piratebay is a legal service (in Sweden) hosting no copyrighted material. Swedish law does not condemn faciltating copyright infringement.
Swedish law does however not really like sabotage, vandalism, unautorized access and other sauch malarkey.

That said, I didn't see that one coming, laughed out loud.
It's about bloody time that someone took big media and smacked them a little for all these strongarm tactics.
Hopefully the media coverage on this will highlight some of the issues, like HOW the media companies think business should be run. If small businesses tried this they would immediately be taken down (in almost any country) for much more serious crimes than copyright infringement.

And please try not to call it "pirating". That's a term coined by the mpaa (if I remember correctly) to try to make it sound really bad. If we, the geeks, are careful to call it what it is, copyright infringement or illegal copying, we can perhaps change public perception of the issues a little.
The ONLY thing that bugs me about thepiratebay is the name. Yes it IS cool but also makes us all look a bit like rebelling teenagers, even those of us who have thought deeply about copyright issues and realised that the system needs fixing to work in the modern world.

Re:legality

And please try not to call it "pirating". That's a term coined by the mpaa (if I remember correctly) to try to make it sound really bad. If we, the geeks, are careful to call it what it is, copyright infringement or illegal copying, we can perhaps change public perception of the issues a little. The ONLY thing that bugs me about thepiratebay is the name. Yes it IS cool but also makes us all look a bit like rebelling teenagers, even those of us who have thought deeply about copyright issues and realised that the system needs fixing to work in the modern world.

It has worked reasonably well in Sweden, where the think-tank The Pirate Bureau [piratbyran.org] formed shortly after the copyright industry had created the Anti-Pirate Bureau [antipiratbyran.com], an organisation consisting mostly of lawyers and paid P2P network infiltrators that tries to track down people distributing copyrighted material. The Pirate Bureau became rather well-known and popular, and was often invited to TV debates on copyright law, and interviewed and asked for comments when newspapers published articles about the subject - and were so successful that the copyright lobbyists adopted a policy a few years ago to refuse debates where representatives from the Pirate Bureau were participating. And then there's the Pirate Party [piratpartiet.se], which didn't get enough votes to take seats in the parliament this time but was treated as a serious candidate by most of the media, despite its name.

When someone is calling you names, it's usually a lot more effective to embrace it than to try and distance yourself from it.

Re:legality

It is your civic duty to get 100 of your closest personal friends together, dress up like pirates complete with eye patches, and each buy a ticket into the same movie. When you get into the theatre, start yelling "Arr!" and "Shiver me timbers!" and other such things. If they try to throw you out on the grounds that you're a pirate, start with the following questionnaire:

1.) Do we currently possess any stolen property? This may include such things as large chests, sacks full of coins, sacks full of other property, or anything not included on this list but that may reasonably be construed as the personal property of another person not lawfully acquired.

2.) Have we attempted to acquire any property that you may reasonably believe to be that of the theatre's? This may include money from the tills, employees, food, tickets, and hard copies of movies.

3.) Are there any ocean piers about which we may potentially raid after the successful conclusion of the movie?

4.) If so, do you see any ships flying a "Jolly Roger" flag of some sort with large square sails and many cannon and other weapons of war sticking out of them?

5.) Are we in a landlocked city? To clarify, is it even possible for us to raid from a ship? Note that this eliminates any possibility of us pirating.

If they continue to pursue you as pirates, start shouting about discrimination against seamen and how outrageous it is that they could suspect you of theft while on land. Continually claim that you are "water-only" pirates and that the land lubbers with video cameras are not true pirates and do not have sea legs. This part is why it's important to have a large number of co-conspirators.

And remember, you can't spell conspiracy without pirates.

Big ones

Whether you're pro or anti-piracy, you have to admit...those TPB boys have balls :)

Saying that, a bit of poking around [cornell.edu] indicates the US has an extradition treaty with Sweden. Hopefully their government will have balls as well when the IP merchants finally bribe the government to take the kid gloves off...

Re:Big ones

Hopefully their government will have balls as well when the IP merchants finally bribe the government to take the kid gloves off...

Government officials' first priority is to get re-elected (so they can continue stealing, if you're the cynical kind), and the last attempt to turn the swedish government into a part of the US police force turned very badly against them. I never heard anything about the criminal charges that were brought against the then minister of the interior, but the shit-storm hit fast and hard and very publicly - the #1 thing politicians try to avoid.

I doubt they'll be making that mistake again.

They'll probably bully the ISP next time.

Re:Big ones

Extradition treaties don't allow the US government to apply US laws to Swedish nationals acting completely in accordance with Swedish law on Swedish soil, regardless of what some people may think.

Re:Heh

With the difference that what The Pirate Bay does, actually is legal in Sweden.

Re:Berne Convention

Where does the berne convention say _anything_ about trackers where people can register to share whether they have a file with a cetain sha1 hash?

Please mind that if they were offering _downloads_, then there wouldnt be an argument.
But they dont.

Re:Heh

What if the verdict was wrong? what then? You have just taken away something that can never be given back. A human life. It is more valuable than gold or anything known to man, as nothing can buy you another one.

Re:Heh

What if the verdict was wrong?

Rarely happens.

Since the death penalty has been reintroduced, there have been 1096 executions in the US [deathpenaltyinfo.org]. During the same period, there have been 124 exonerations [deathpenaltyinfo.org].

Clearly, the verdict is wrong a significant amount of the time.

Re:Heh

What's wrong with the death penalty? Ah, let's see...

1) Human error. Unfortunately, being innocent isn't a guarantee that you won't be convicted of a crime (especially if you are poor and black). So there's a chance that a person killed by the state was not guilty of the crime. With incarceration, you can set them free and compensate them somewhat for the mistake. With a death, you can't.

2) The religious angle. Many religious types believe that incarceration gives the prisoner a chance to earn redemption and avoid eternal punishment. (This works both ways - one long-held reason for execution was to allow a higher judge to determine the right sentence)

3) The economic angle. Contrary to general opinion, prisons can and do make money. That's one reason why private industry lines up to run prisons. Why kill off perfectly good slave labour? Remember - the advantage of slave labour is that the shirts made on Friday aren't worse than the shirts made on Monday!

4) Human rights factors. The US is the only western country, and one of three in the world, that will execute children and the intellectually impaired. Okay, by the time the appeals process goes through, the child is now an adult, but killing someone for a crime committed when they were 12? Seriously.

5) The scattergun approach. Look at the sort of things you can get the death sentence for in the US. Heck, if you're driving a car [reuters.com] and a passenger decides to shoot down someone, you can get the death sentence.

6) The racist angle. The vast majority of people on death row are racial minorities - way out of proportion with the general prison population, or even the subset who committed similar crimes. Why? Because juries [cornell.edu] are more likely to give the death sentence recommendation to blacks and Hispanics. The lack of an objective and impartial set of criteria makes the use of the death sentence subject to these distortions.

7) The poverty angle. When was the last time someone who could afford their own lawyer got sentenced to death in the US? The fact of the matter is that far too many of these death sentence cases are handled by overworked public prosecutors. If you've got a competent lawyer, and a death sentence looks like a strong possibility, then you will nearly always end up doing a plea bargain, resulting in an incarceration instead (often for a lesser crime, like manslaughter).

I could go on, but... I just don't want to. :)

Re:Heh

of course not, pirating music and movies costs multinationals money, molesting a child costs them nothing, it's obvious what is more evil.

Re:Heh

No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not.
Distributing drugs is illegal, and distributing music without paying the copyright owner is illegal.

Its because of analogies like yours, that people think that ANY file sharing is illegal.

If you must use an analogy, at least use one that is correct AND appropriate to your audience, /.

"This is like the car dealer calling the cops because someone vandalized the cars on his lot"

Whether he owned all the cars on the lot or "parked" them there without the car owner's permissions, I don't care. The vandals should still be held responsible.

Re:Heh

No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not. Distributing drugs is illegal, and distributing music without paying the copyright owner is illegal. Its because of analogies like yours, that people think that ANY file sharing is illegal.

Also, the Pirate Bay team isn't doing any file sharing. Or, well, they probably are, in private. But The Pirate Bay is just an indexing service, like Google or Yahoo - they are not distributing any material that would infringe on anyone's copyright, and what they are doing is with a very high probability legal under current Swedish law.

The prosecutor who is in charge of the investigation associated with the raid against The Pirate Bay in June 2006, when all their servers were confiscated (and the site was up and running again in 3 days), has been looking over the material for almost 16 months now, and has asked the court for time extensions (and received them) twice - apparently he is having trouble finding proof of any illegal activities despite the fact that all the hundreds of thousands of torrents on the site are visible to everyone. His most recent extension expires on next monday, October 1st, at which point he has to press charges, drop the case, or request another extension - guess what he will do?

Re:Heh

much the same as bayimg, i imagine - not so much that the child porn is illegal, as that it offends the admins

just my 2c

Re:Heh

No, the police have not returned any hardware or even backup copies of the contents of the disks, not to The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Bureau [piratbyran.org] nor to some of the smaller businesses that were renting rack space in the same server hall. Some of the larger businesses that could afford scary lawyers have gotten their hardware back though.

I don't know if there is a hard limit on the investigation time - I think the prescriptive period for copyright infringement is 5 years (though I'm not sure), so if that is what he wants to press charges for he has to do it before June 2011...

Re:Heh

"No, its not! Drugs are illegal, music is not."

I thought music was a drug?

Re:Heh

Distributing drugs is illegal

      Oh goodness me, what am I going to do with all that morphine, fentanyl, diazepam, and ketamine I have under lock and key at my clinic?

      Distributing drugs is not ALWAYS illegal.

Re:Heh

seriously dude, ketamine has been replaced by numerous less-harmful drugs for literally all of it's applications.

      In the United States. You are making an assumption that I am in the USA. I am not.

      As for ketamine being "pretty damaging" - lol. You can't learn medicine by reading wikipedia. It has less risk of cardiopulmonary depression than diazepam, has a longer half life than midazolam, has none of the serious depressing/nauseous effects of opioids, and is PERFECT for sedating small children for an hour or so while certain procedures are performed (ultrasound, CT, etc). It's dissociative effect prevent it from being used as a mainstream anesthetic for surgical procedures but for sedation it's great.

Re:Heh

Thalidomide: Originally prescribed to combat morning sickness in pregnant women (with horrific results) with absolutely no evidence to suggest that it was really anything more than a placebo, it was subsequently withdrawn from market.

      It's used in the third world to treat leprosy, and it is VERY effective.

Re:Heh

Thalidomide is also under investigation for help in cancer treatment. It impedes the growth of tumors by preventing them from growing new blood vessels. ("Angiogenesis inhibitor"... the same mechanism which caused the birth defects.)

Re:Heh

The site is a bad egg that is up to no good in the hood!

Copyrights are protected by law. Trackers and checksums pointing to outside sources of copyrighted material are not illegal in Sweden. Yes, they encourage copyright violations. This may be "bad" in the moral sense (depending on your morals, I tend to side more with Trent Reznor [youtube.com] myself).

Now, hacking a legitimate (in the legal sense) website is very much illegal and I certainly feel it's immoral. If my next door neighbor put a giant arrow in his yard pointing to my house proclaiming "STEAL FROM THIS GUY!" I'm still not allowed to go burn his house down.

Re:Heh

This is like the drug dealer calling the cops because someone stole his stash.

This is like the Amsterdam coffee-shop proprietor calling the cops because someone keeps trying to break into his premises, and stalking his customers.

Remember, The Pirate Bay is doing nothing that is illegal in Sweden.

with the difference, that the drugs is legal

So what you are basically saying, this is like a doctor calling the police because his drug cabinet was smashed.

Granted, this is also like a slave owner reporting a runaway slave to the police or the citizen who turned in Anne Frank just doing his civic responsibility (Oh hi godwin, how you doing.)

The simple fact is that the law isn't always "right". Some big media do not like swedish law, just as some hard drug users do not like swedish law, or as same slaves did not like eh slave laws etc etc. The problem is that if you then fight that law by disobeying it, you run the risk of the police coming around and talk sternly to you (or if you are black gun you down as you reach for your wallet, somethings never change).

Re:Heh

It's more like suing the guy who keeps breaking into your house and destroying all your hydroponic gardening equipment.

Murdering a drug dealer is still murder

Is that not true?

Whether the drugs happen to be legal (caffeine, alcohol, pot, hash, pseudoephedrine...) or not is irrelevant. A crime committed against an unpopular person/group is still a crime.

Re:Heh

This is like the drug dealer calling the cops because someone stole his stash.

No, it's like someone who has told someone else that a third party has a certain file calling the cops and telling he has had his home vandalized by Mafia thugs and corrupted cops and government officials working for foreign financial interests.

It's not the Pirate Bay which is criminal, likely treasonous and has connections to organized crime (not to mention has emulated their business model) here.

Re:Heh

...I still don't get it. Could somebody re-phrase that as a car analogy, please?

Re:Heh

Imagine you buy a car, then Pirate Bay sues Big Media for harassing their site systematically with the help of mercenary hackers.

Phew, it was easy...

Much more clear now, don't you think so?

Re:Heh

It's like a guy's rented car being slowed down by a speed limiter even though the guy is driving within the speed limit.

No wait, that would be DRM.

Okay how about this:

Imagine there's a public road with lots of houses on both sides. And there's the starbucks coffee shop. The big corporation is selling coffee to the residents every morning, who badly need it. Now some residents need to drive far to get to the coffee shop and in the wrong direction (opposite of work). A guy figures out the formula for his favorite starbucks coffee and decides to open his own specialized little coffee shop at home. Because he has a little house, he can't sell the coffee to many people at once and being low budget has no money to advertise, but some close neighbors who like the same type of coffee are spared the tedious trip to starbucks for getting their fix. Soon many more such coffee shops open, but it's still all garage type, low profile and very few people know where to get their favorite coffee besides starbucks.

Then a smart guy buys a big truck and fills it with lists of the small coffee shops. He drives up and down the road and people who ask are given a list of all the shops that sell their favorite type of coffee so they can pick the nearest to buy the coffee there.

Now less and less people go to starbucks and starbucks likes it not. So they decide to make sure no more formulas are stolen from them. They put up rules for how, where and if you can drink the coffee you bought from them and on your way out you get a retinal scan.

Also starbucks now hires gangsters to force the advertising truck from the road, shoot the driver, flat the tires, jam the road etc...

Today there are many drivers advertising the little coffee shops and secret letter correspondence between starbucks and the gangsters has leaked to the public recently. A pissed off driver who has been a victim of gangster harassment has now called the police and the special execution forces of the justice department.

Making the same coffee as starbucks is illegal, advertising fowhere to buy it is not.

To be continued...

Re:Heh

Now less and less people go to starbucks and starbucks likes it not.

Now more and more people go to starbucks and they are making more money than ever before and starbucks likes it not.

Fixed it for ya.

Re:Heh

The legal definition of theft is appropriation of another's property with the intent to deprive that person totally of the use of that property. In other words, I steal your car when I take it, and drive away with no intent to return it. If I take your CD to my house, copy it, and return the CD, I haven't deprived you of any property so totally as to bar your further use of that property. So I haven't committed theft. I may have violated the copyrights on the CD, but not theft.

Re:Illegal evidence?

In Sweden there is no such concept as "legally obtained evidence", any evidence can be presented in court and then it's up to to the judge to weight the different sides evidence against each other. The procedure with admission of evidence mostly exist in common-law countries, with a layman's jury.

Re:Illegal evidence?

I am from Sweden, so I was interested about the subject and searched on the Internet. I found a very good link on the European Commission website that contains some simplified information about the different justice systems in the european union. Below is the link to the english version of the chapter discussing evidence and proof in Sweden (There are also quick links to pages discussion the same for each and every country in the EU)

http://ec.europa.eu/civiljustice/evidence/evidence_swe_en.htm/ [europa.eu]

8. Can evidence that has been acquired in an unlawful manner be referred to as evidence?

The principle of admissibility of evidence means that there are only certain rare exceptions where it is forbidden to use certain types of evidence. That evidence has been acquired in an unlawful manner does not therefore, in principle, prevent the proof being referred to during the trial. This can, however, be of significance in the weighing of evidence.

Re:Illegal evidence?

Sweden, like most of continental Europe, uses the Civil Law system, as opposed to the Common Law system. America and most other areas formerly controlled by the British use the Common Law system. While similar, they are not identical and definately do not have the same procedures.

While it might not be considered valid evidence under the Common Law system, it can probably be admitted as evidence under the Civil Law system. See the poster above me for references.

Re:Illegal evidence?

Informative? Try misinformative...

They have rules of evidence in Sweden, as confirmed by a quick search. I can't find a good site on how it works, but any number confirm that they exist. (They are quite necessary for justice.)

Re:Illegal evidence?

Informative? Try misinformative...

They have rules of evidence in Sweden, as confirmed by a quick search. I can't find a good site on how it works, but any number confirm that they exist. (They are quite necessary for justice.)

It is perfectly fine to use any evidence you may have, no matter how you got hold of it, in court.

The exception being, of course, things that a person have said to their doctor or lawyer, since they are forbidden to talk about what their patients say.

Read chapter 35, paragraph 1 in law 1942:740, "rättegångsbalken" (law of prosecution? means something like that), in the swedish book of law if you do not believe me. You can find the law in question here [lagen.nu], although it's obviously in swedish.

So, who was misinformative again?

Re:Illegal evidence?

so in other words be just as childish and stupid about how you live your life because someone else is?

how about people today take the high road and just boycot all big media? you want to give them a real fuck you? one hwere the government won't step in and help them constantly? Don't buy, download, listen, or watch any of their stuff. support independent labels and independent movies or find something else to do!!!

your idea is stupid. people have been doing it and it's not giving the media companies a bloody nose. It's giving them massive government support around the world, direct tax revenue flowing towards them, and a reducing of our legal rights because they can make a legit complaint.

I hope kids around hte world finally realize that you don't harm a media company by downloading their stuff; you only make them more powerful by giving them powerful allies in various governments and legal precedents around the world. The person who downloads rampantly is doing them the greatest favor imaginable.

Re:Makes me laugh

The existence of Pirate Bay raises some serious issues. I don't know the answers.

But the situation makes me laugh.

Wow thanks for that insightful comment. Without knowing your opinion - or lack of one - I don't know how any of us could have dealt with this news in a rational way. You've brought light were there was only darkness. :P

Re:Lets see...

Then we will send Fingers, Lucky, and Guido after to to cause harm.

Jesus.. I can't think of anything more scary to opening my door to body parts, a dwarf, and a python programmer.

Re:what revolution?

here all the media companies go out of business, and all music, software, TV and movies become free for everyone? Also known as the day that mass culture died

That's not culture, that's manufacture.

Re:Can't Have It Both Ways?

There's a lot more to this than sabotaging torrents, which is the least of the concerns (most of that activity has been obsolesced by technological measures taken by modern Torrent clients and trackers anyway ... encryption, distributed hash tables, rating systems, etc.) This is about the media companies using illegal means to gain access to confidential information (paying crackers to break into private systems for one) among other juicy bits. The Pirate Bay folks have been saying this for a long time, but didn't have a lot of evidence. Now it seems they've been pretty thoroughly vindicated by the Media Defender leak.

This is officially Very Cool Stuff.