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Four Indicted in Pirate Bay Case
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:21 AM
from the yo-ho-yo-ho-a-pirate's-life-for-awwww dept.
from the yo-ho-yo-ho-a-pirate's-life-for-awwww dept.
paulraps writes "Suddenly the founders of the Pirate Bay are not so hearty. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site were indicted in Sweden on Thursday on charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law. And this is more than just a shot across the bows. The prosecutor reckons that they can be hooked for 'promoting other people's copyright breaches' but there will be no walking the plank: instead, they face fines of up to $200,000 and the confiscation of all their hardware. 'The Swedish prosecutor listed dozens of works that had been downloaded through The Pirate Bay site, including The Beatles' Let It Be, Robbie Williams' Intensive Care and the movie Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire. Plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.'"
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Pirate Bay Gets a 4,000-Page Complaint 643 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Swedish prosecutors appear to be close to finally pressing charges against The Pirate Bay, having served them with 4,000 pages of legal papers. While this might appear bad, the administrators have already moved some of the servers out of the country, so Swedish prosecutors can't shut it down, even if they want to. Moreover, the people of Sweden are decidedly on their side, with the Pirate Party, which is sympathetic to TPB's cause, being one of the top ten political parties in the country. Still, this looks like a dirty trick on the part of the prosecutors — like they're dumping all of this on the defendants in the hope that they won't have enough time to sort through it and defend themselves. For comparison, the second-biggest murder case in Sweden required only 1,500 pages."
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Sweden to Give Courts New Power to Hunt IP Infringers 171 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Swedish Culture & Justice ministers are preparing to give new power to Swedish courts to let them force ISPs to give up subscriber IPs. The end goal is trying subscribers in court for copyright infringement. As the one-time home of the Pirate Bay, which is now internationally distributed, they face both US pressure and push-back at home. The Swedish arm of the Pirate Party is calling this move a 'sanctioned blackmailing operation', but hopefully the Swedish courts won't allow the IFPI to use as many tricks as the RIAA has in US courts."
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The opposition made their homework this time (Score:5, Insightful)
The interesting argument brought up is that the defendants are in this to make money, and the prosecutor says he can prove elaborate plans to split the quite hefty incomes from advertising that the Pirate Bay is raking in. While linking to copyrighted material may be legal, making money from actively enabling people copyright infringement probably is harder to sneak by the courts.
Re:Done their homework? (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have any facts - not speculations - supporting that any prosecutor, judge or police took bribes from the recording industry or its lobby groups ? I very much doubt that.
Parent
Re:Done their homework? (Score:5, Informative)
A moral prosector would of course tell the record companies to find a business model that doesn't depend on supply of expensive physical media for digital content that can be copied for almost no cost. Since sharing actually boosts sales of music the issue is not piracy per se, but rather the fact that open sharing prevents the recording industry from gaining exclusive control of the media. The only way to do this now is to seek to have ISP filtering/spyware/big brother type shenanigans instituted on the government level and to lock folks out of trying to circumvent government mandated via DMCA-like provisions.
The RIAA is playing the long game here to try to become the world's gatekeeper for all entertainment content and the prosecutor for the Swedish government is almost certainly being offered at the very least political influence, if not actual monetary bribes. The lack of a plethora of prior cases should not be taken as lack of an agenda here. When you make a move like this, it is calculated to have the most impact possible, and the RIAA is hoping for Sweden to make another Napster decision. Then you'll see the courts flooded with cases against infringement.
Parent
Re:Done their homework? (Score:5, Insightful)
NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!
UPLOADING *copyrighted* movies and songs *which you don't have the copyright holder's permission to distribute* is illegal.
Parent
Re:Done their homework? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Done their homework? (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize you're throwing this challenge down to a group largely consisting of people who regularly write copyrighted works of computer code and contribute them freely to the world, right? Most of those here who don't have a coding credit to their name make extensive use of those works, contribute testing and bug reports, etc. You're talking to people who already put their money where your mouth is. You're doing it on a site that's owned by a company whose entire mission statement is facilitating that, and which makes money doing it.
Parent
Re:Dangerous Nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
And when I find that way, when you start whining that your predecessors were able to take much more money from mine than you do from me, I won't care.
Parent
Re:The opposition made their homework this time (Score:5, Informative)
The MPAA members, OTOH, probably consider anything without a "billion" suffix chump change. Their combined revenue is in the hundreds of billions (too lazy to dig up all the numbers, but it's bound to be in the $100-200bn range). They employ thousands of people. DIS alone has some 130k employees. $4m is somewhere in the range of one of their CEO's pay.
Parent
Summary correction. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plenty has been downloaded because of it.
All the legal arguments are going to hinge around this vital distinction, so it would help if the submitter could have been bothered to get it right.
Re:Summary correction. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Summary correction. (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't the submitter:
Of course, he could have also listed dozens of works that have been downloaded through Microsoft Windows, through the phone company, through Dell, etc ... since they didn't host the files either.
Parent
Our laws are not the world's laws. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Our laws are not the world's laws. (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently the government thinks so. The US government recently had a Canadian arrested on Canadian soil for selling marijuana seeds on the internet (something that's not illegal in Canada). At no time did this person set foot on American soil, nor did he ever break Canadian law. Everything he did was above board right down to declaring exactly what he did on his Canadian tax return and paying taxes on the income. All profits were even donated to charity.
Yet the US government felt that they had the right to arrest him. More info here: http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5h9Y7CVPeypqV77yWBmI45x_mP9SA [google.com].
Parent
Re:Our laws are not the world's laws. (Score:5, Insightful)
He broke no Canadian laws - it's the Americans that broke the law by buying. He never advertised in the US, nor did he ever solicit their business. If you sold something on ebay that was legal in the US, but broke the laws of the country of the person who bought it, would you accept extradition to that country to rot in their jails?
Thats not the whole story. He's only not fighting extridition because they were threatening to sue/arrest his coworkers and friends - one who has a medical condition and would have likely died in a US prison. He nor his friends have any money to fight these constant lawsuits that the US government has been firing at him for the last 20 years.
Parent
At least they didn't copy a CD! (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing they didn't copy a CD, otherwise they'd be paying $1.5 million [slashdot.org]!
not downloaded from the Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been said 1000 times: These things were not downloaded FROM the Pirate Bay - they just provide the reference as to where they could be downloaded from. Do you think that by listing The Beatles and Robbie Williams I'm supposed to have sympathy? By listing Harry Potter are they 'thinking of the children?' - is the list of big media supposed to be scary? TPB are very careful not to break Swedish law. They don't care what the laws of other countries are - (I'm looking at you USA) as they live in SWEDEN they are only concerned with Swedish law.
I hope they come out squeaky clean - as they should as they have not broken their countries law.
Re:not downloaded from the Pirate Bay (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Indict Google... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just have their lawyers show up in court with a laptop (with wireless connection and the appropriate software installed) and go to Google. Search for "Harry Potter Goblet Fire Torrent" and click a link. Viola- bittorrent starts up. Therefore, Google can be used to search for torrents, therefore they should be charged, too. If they are not charged, then it demonstrates selective prosecution. The same goes for ANY search engine.
They look pretty hearty to me (Score:5, Informative)
http://thepiratebay.org/blog/100 [thepiratebay.org]
Of course, it could be bluffing--but given their general reaction to legal threats [thepiratebay.org] and their reaction to the last raid [thepiratebay.org], I'm guessing not.
I find it incredibly amusing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ho ho ho, this is BAD (Score:5, Insightful)
This will have consequences for all search engines (Score:5, Insightful)
What about hiring a prostitute from an escort/dating service listed in the phonebook? Can the publishers of the phonebook be charged as accomplices to the crime?
This case will have profound consequences for anyone in the search or directory business.
-ted
How else with the **AA make money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I think The Pirate Bay is the best thing to happen. Because of it, we've gotten rid of cable TV. My wife and I will download a TV show or a movie before we buy it, watch a few episodes or minutes, and then go and buy the legit copy. The Pirate Bay is today's equivalent to reruns or syndication for television shows, or Blockbuster or NetFlix for the movie industry. The monopolists are just mad because they lose control over which productions to push and which to let fall by the wayside. Even better, torrent search sites also replace Nielsen for rating what is popular. I can find the latest popular movies just by sorting by seeds, and because of this I have purchased about 40 movies that I would NEVER have even heard of. Heck, the wife and I actually bought the Bourne trilogy because of The Pirate Bay -- the TV commercials and trailers were so bad that we would never have even thought of it.
Am I a pirate? In some ways, yes, but we own tens of thousands of dollars worth of music, TV DVDs, and movies, and I attribute it solely to being able to taste before I buy. I think in the past year we've had MAYBE ten torrents that I forgot to erase when I realized I didn't like what I saw.
Remember who these large production companies are: they're multi-tiered organizations where the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand. These companies do many things:
1. Raise money and invest in productions (i.e., producing)
2. Market finished productions (i.e., advertising)
3. Protect the industry insiders (actors, directors, producers, and crew) from competition by locking the distribution medium (i.e., monopolizing)
Now, the future is getting rid of them. Want to raise money for a money or a TV pilot? Invest in making a trailer. Put it out there. Get people interested to fund your production, maybe even sell bonds (of course the SEC and IRS will prevent you from doing this versus a market economy where people understand the risks inherent to investing). Once you've raised enough, you go and shoot the flick. Give it away online at low res, or evne at high res, and sell value added products to raise the funds. If people love the production, they'll pay for it. We do. Many of our friends do. Most of my family does.
I laugh when people try to get great shows back on the air, like Serenity. Joss Whedon is one of the most vile monopolists ever. It's his fault directly for the death of Firefly. He could get online, start a money raising campaign, and go back to business. But he wants to pander to his union/monopolist buddies. He loves the residuals he receives on the backs of others. He's part of the industry, and that's why I'm glad Firefly failed, even though we love the show and watch the legal DVDs regularly. Screw Joss, screw Hollywood, and screw the industry twice over -- they're not ready for a truly market-based economy of art, where people subsidize the FUTURE production of more content by purchasing the previously produced content.
The Internet will destroy these monopolists/mercantilists quicker and quicker every day. Their only option to "save themselves" and their grotesque profits is to use the laws that THEY created, prompt the pawns that THEY elected, and force people to pay money that the people earned through labors they actively did. The people behind the Pirate Bay spend an amazing amount of time keeping it running. The users may submit content, but the servers, Internet connections, software code and overall support need labor to keep it running. TPB deserves every penny, and then some. Maybe TPB should produce a high budget movie or TV series.
Making Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone read that and NOT think: "What's the difference from Record labels?" =P
Google Protected by DMCA (Score:5, Interesting)
See, in the US, if you're operating an index like Google or Napster that works on an automated basis or is controlled by your users, you don't have to worry about infringing material, until you have actual knowledge of it. Once you have actual knowledge of infringing material you have to do something about it. Thats the difference between Google and Pirate Bay (besides the fact that TPB is not in the USA.) Once Google has actual knowledge of infringing material they take it down and they are OK.
Furthermore, Google's service just finds torrents. TPBs helps you find torrents, but they also host the torrents. After you've download the torrent from TPB, TPB's tracker helps you connect to the other peers for exchanging the requested infringing material. Combined with the actual knowledge of infringing torrents on their site, that's a lot closer to contributory infringement than anything that Google does.
Back to your regularly scheduled TPB Swedish Legal Follies.