Swedish Anti-Piracy Lawyer Gets New Name 'Pirate' 178
An anonymous reader writes "Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet (in Swedish) reports that Henrik Pontén, a lawyer of Antipiratbyrån, a Swedish organization against file sharing, has received a notification from officials that an application for change of his name has been approved and a new first name 'Pirate' has been added to his name. Authorities do not check the identity of persons applying for name changes. Pirate Pontén now has to apply for another change in order to revert the change."
it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Insightful)
Horribly childish, and just gives the opposition more ammo, and reinforces the childish stereotype.
But goddamn that's a brilliant prank.
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Agreed, but even though it will be viewed as a cheap prank it is still quite clever. Not to mention the fact that it had me LMFAO!!
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is also the possibility that he did this too himself, nobody knows since who ever changed his name is anonymous.
And know this, the news article was published on the day before the Swedish election. Very suspicious timing by the anti-piracy agency here...
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...who ever changed his name is anonymous.
I don't think that Anonymous [wikipedia.org] is responsible for this, but while we're speaking of them, I predict that a great number of prominent Swedish Scientologists will soon find themselves with creative names as soon as word gets out that you don't have to give your real name. Although Scientologists have had as much scandal in Sweden as they have in most of the world, I think they still have a population there at least proportional to many other places and are about as well-received.
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Or someone on his team.
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:4, Insightful)
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In other words, you're starting with a conclusion (anti-piracy is teh fascism, pirates are saints) and moving backwards from there, and any facts that doesn't fit that model are a conspiracy to discredit those wonderful pirates. I wish I could say this thought surprised me.
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Well it is the pretty much the same as comparing a child who copies a song, to a person who steals the family car, pirates come on now really. To be clear here, if I could press the button and make a copy of any car I liked, well bugger the copyrightists and show me the button.
So yeah, moves are afoot to get copyright back under control, to eliminate the excessive influence of publicists and mass media over politics, ensure that copyright is valued well below the real essential of life, that only content
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Not so fast ... understand the full implication of "published on the day before the Swedish election". Could be members of The Pirate Party, the folks that run The Pirate Bay. These guys have real candidates running for real public offices.
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Of course not. But the Pirate Bay are Pirate Party members, obviously. So in a sense the Pirate Party is partly made up by the Pirate Bay.
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No, not really, only one of them voted for the Pirate Party, the others did not. If he is also a member of the Pirate Party I have no idea.
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or we could admit that speculation either way is pointless. People do fake crimes, and Occam's Razor != knowing.
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think speculation is pointless. We have one extremely unlikely possibility, and one extremely likely possibility. Saying speculation is pointless implies they are equally likely.
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you know a sense of humor is on your side in an argument, faking a crime to make the other side look childish is a compelling tactic. Do you really think the anti-piracy groups are too stupid to realize the potential?
People can and do frame others for crimes. Scientologists have a long running history of it, I don't doubt that copy-right leachers (the people who make money off of other's copyrights without actually contributing anything) would try this same kind of thing.
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The Pirate Bay style guys made thmeselves look childish already...
http://thepiratebay.org/legal [thepiratebay.org]
Enjoy those mature replies!
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Playgro
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We have one extremely unlikely possibility, and one extremely likely possibility.
Says you, "Mike", if that is your real name...
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Occam's Razor != knowing
Actually, Occam did indeed show that occam's razor was in fact knowing, by using occam's razor, calling "dibs." He successfully defended this in debates by putting his fingers in his ears and yelling "nananananan! I'm Occam I cant hear you! NANANAN!"
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's perfectly legitimate to suspect that this guy did this himself to make the pirate party look more childish and discredit them. We've seen the anti-piracy fucks do weirder, stupider and more far fetched things in the past.
Who do you think you're kidding? (Score:2)
The simplest solution is USUALLY correct. It doesn't mean that the simplest solution is ALWAYS correct.
The race isn't always to the swiftest and the strongest.
But that is the way to bet.
The stunt is transparent - adolescent - pure geek.
No other mind could contrive it.
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Occam's razor is a bit more specific and logically rigorous than the airy-fairy rule of thumb that you're making it out to be. It states that the explanation containing the least number of assumptions is most likely to be correct. Statistically speaking this is rigorous, since each extra assumption has a non zero chance of being wrong - so every new assumption increases the chances that the explanation is wrong. The most rational choice of explanations is the one that, given all the information you have to
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The second hypothesis has more assumptions, so it must be less likely than the first, by your reasoning.
No, because Occam's Razor only applies when there is no difference between the theories in terms of predictions made by those theories. It's about deciding which explanation to use when the explanations are essentially interchangable. Not how to decide between two arbitrary theories with completely different implications based not on data but based solely on which is the more complex.
The classic case wa
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If you look at the reasoning in the post I replied to, you see that Ginger Unicorn is trying to justify Occam's Razor as being quantitative:
>> since each extra assumption has a non zero chance of being wrong
And you don't believe that statement can be understood in a qualitative way, such as "Extra assumptions increase the chance one of them is wrong"? "Non-zero" indicating that some chance exists is hardly a quantitative measure of probability.
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Therefore, the total probability of N such assumptions being incorrect is less than that of M such assumptions, if N is less than M.
You can't compare two non-zero qualitative probabilities in that way;
Sure you can, as long as you consider "less" to be a fuzzy measurement as well. You raise your thumb, eyeball the probabilities, and make an educated guess as to which truly involves more assumption than the other.
Though going back to the original post we're talking about, the words "statistically rigorous" s
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It's perfectly legitimate to suspect that this guy did this himself to make the pirate party look more childish and discredit them. We've seen the anti-piracy fucks do weirder, stupider and more far fetched things in the past.
We cannot know if he did it himself to discredit the pirates.
But he did break this story just days before the election where the Pirate Party according to the polls at that time was going to win two seats (they ended up with only one seat). And he used the media time he got because of this to blame the Pirate Party for a lot of alledged harrasment, including death threats. Some of the harrasment he blamed the Pirate Party for dates back to long before the Pirate Party was even founded.
He is currently h
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Furthermore, Occam razor doesn't mean jack shit. "The simplest solution is USUALLY correct". It doesn't mean that the simplest solution is ALWAYS correct.
You are misstating what Occam's Razor is. The principle is that if you have 2 alternate theories that both make identical predictions and the only difference is that 1 theory includes additional complications with no additional explanatory power, then the simpler one should be kept and the complex one discarded.
Occam's Razor says absolutely nothing about how to compare 2 alternate theories that don't both make the same predictions. In order to choose between theories with different predictions the correct
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From what I recall of this story, the stuff about asking for the money back certainly at least bordered on fraudulent, but I'm not entirely convinced that the micropayments in and of themselves were fraudulent, or that they even could be. Perhaps on a sufficiently large scale they could be called harassment.
The payments were, at least in theory, legitimate payments, an individual sent money to repay a legal debt. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no law requiring a minimum for an electronic payment, an
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"Fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them â" usually, to obtain property or services unjustly."
Fraud is actually a broad crime, the act performed to defraud doesn't need to specifically be illegal.
Sending large amounts of irregular wire transfers purely for the purpose of causing monetary damage would most certainly be a criminal act.
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"Fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them â" usually, to obtain property or services unjustly."
Sending large amounts of irregular wire transfers purely for the purpose of causing monetary damage would most certainly be a criminal act.
If there's a law against, it, sure. But it doesn't fit your definition of fraud. They're not deceiving anyone by sending them money, and they're also not obtaining property or services unjustly. Could be it's a legal form of harrassment. Similar (thought much, much smaller) to suing someone and dropping the case after they're racked up a good amount of legal fees.
What's morally wrong isn't always illegal, and what's morally right isn't always legal.
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It should be illegal because someone with a great deal of money could use the technique to basically bankrupt anyone they so choose. If you sent enough money in small enough increments you could wipe out their entire savings and possibly their balance down to a significantly negative number depending on the bank.
Yes, banks are capable of stopping it, but since all those excess fees go to them, why should they? There's a thousand things which could be done to make micro-payments work, but the banks aren't p
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The only reason a bank would change this model is if they thought they could gain an advantage out of it, or their one of their competitors did it first.
Banks don't compete nearly as hard as you think they do for customers. Yes they're willing to spend quite a bit of money to get people in the door, but that's because in today's modern age where everything you do is tied to your bank account, changing banks is a lot of work and a customer will probably stay with them until life circumstances force them to c
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It is indeed a good prank. He should be more interested in securing the name change process instead of trying to pin it on the Pirate Party or one of their supporters. They may never know who actually submitted the change.
Who is he really now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who is he really now? (Score:5, Funny)
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But wouldn't that be a forgery of the signature I made when I ordered a Swedish VPN exit point? ;-)
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I would say that this reinforces more the uncontrolled "outlaw" stereotype than the "childish" one, right in line with the Rand Corporation propaganda, which links file sharing to organized crime and terrorism. This precisely and effectively serves that purpose, whoever it is who did this. And I don't find anything redeeming in the fact that it is a brilliant prank or not.
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I would say that this reinforces more the uncontrolled "outlaw" stereotype than the "childish" one, right in line with the Rand Corporation propaganda, which links file sharing to organized crime and terrorism.
think about that for a moment... terrorists exploiting a security flaw in government bureaucracy to change someone's name without their permission?!?
hardly sounds like an organised crime/terrorism MO does it now?
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The RIAA has done stupider things in courts, I wouldn't rule it out.
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Horribly childish, and just gives the opposition more ammo, and reinforces the childish stereotype.
But hey... They got a seat on the EU parliament. [bbc.co.uk]
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Interesting)
But goddamn that's a brilliant prank.
In my mind, this is actually a little beyond childish prank territory.
To all you folks who are going to write in with "ZOMG LMAO! Grow a sense of humor!" and so on, ask yourselves: would a straight-up act of identity theft be as funny if it were aimed at an anti-copyright lobbyist? This isn't a prank--the man's signature was forged on an official document, and then (apparently) submitted to the Swedish tax authorities. I don't know about Sweden, but in the U.S. that's pretty heavily criminal conduct.
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:it will only hurt the cause... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's blazingly hilarious, but if the system's letting anyone change anyone else's name because they're not bothering to check identities, then the system is broken. Simple as that. Better it's abused in such a fashion now, rather than something more serious, so that it can be fixed.
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Oh give me a break, your signature is used many places when sending in forms without any further identity checks. What would you like, a photocopy of the id? It's practicly worthless since there's no telling who really signed it. The next step up is really witnesses like your will or getting married and it's absolutely overkill. He can change it back and no real harm is done. The only thing that happened here was that an asshat abused a system that works just fine. There should probably be an abuse flag to
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Here in the states almost all official action like this requires you showing up in person at the official office to submit the document where they will check id or at least to have the document certified by a state registered and bonded notary republic who will verify your ID.
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Definitely a broken system.
At least they didn't change his name to "Kinderfucker" or whatever the Swedish equivalent would be.
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At least they didn't change his name to "Kinderfucker" or whatever the Swedish equivalent would be.
That would not have gone through as there are guidelines for what name you can have in Sweden and that would definitely not pass, I am actually quite doubtful this one normally would either, and am leaning towards the possibility that whoever that approved the change don't have much sympathy for Pirate Ponten and therefore could not resist approving the change.
"identity theft" - get the fuck out (Score:3, Insightful)
noone STOLE their identity.
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Yep, but even without physically stealing his identity, one can still do damage.
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In fact, they GAVE him a new one.
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I hadn't read the article, and thought it was about an anti-piracy activist... in which case the name 'Pirate' would make sense.
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Any system that can be abused so easily is broken and should be fixed.
As I've said before, I'm in IT security. And I've seen time and again that there are systems that contain very sensitive data with shoddy, if any, security in place. When pointed out, the responsible people usually point me at legal instead of IT.
Legal isn't where security should be done. You don't protect your data with laws, you protect them by protecting them. Handing the security of a system (IT, bureaucratic, whatever) to legal is as
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Any system that can be abused so easily is broken and should be fixed
The Swedish system is very broken. Steps to steal someones identy and clean out their bank account and/or get loans in their name:
1. Find a good victim in the tax records which are publicly available.
2. Go to tax authority and ask for his birth certificate. in Sweden this is a A4 printout.
3. Find out when the victim will be away from home for 3-4 weeks, a bit tricky but far from impossible. Could for example be accomplished by pretending to do market research for a travel agency.
4. Have pictures
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Only because said tax authorities and officials have a stick up their tailpipe. This is a fairly harmless prank incited by the mans own public actions.
Most things are pretty heavily criminal conduct in the U.S. The problem is that people often confuse criminal/illegal with wrong/immoral/bad/evil/nefarious.
This may have been highly illegal but it wasn't particularly bad and certainly not evil. No harm was intended except ridicule and in the U.S. at least, someone who has made themselves such a public figure
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That was my first thought as well. Then again, I've been a victim of Identity Theft. Someone got a hold of my name, address, SSN, and DOB and opened a credit card in my name. (Despite not having the correct Mother's Maiden Name - thank you Capital One for requiring this "Security Question" and then not checking the answer!!!) Luckily, I caught it quickly so no real damage was done, but it's still horrifying to know that your information is out there for any criminal to use.
I'd hate to think what havoc co
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would a straight-up act of identity theft be as funny if it were aimed at an anti-copyright lobbyist?
No, but this wasn't identity theft. It's more like an identity gift.
In any case, it's most likely fraud, but still funny.
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Childish, maybe. Childish by whom is the question.
If I read that correctly, it was not even his own doing. Someone managed to change this guy's name. If he can actually prove this, it's a golden opportunity served on a silver platter. First, he can show that the pro-IP faction is not above namecalling (hey, quite literally so!). Second, he could keep the name and use it whenever someone claims he's "a pirate" ("no, good sir, I am the pirate. Here, my business card. But hey, I thought you already knew...").
F
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If you would like a redress of grievances you need to apply for a permit and wait in line like everyone else and when it is your turn you will be given a date, time, place, appropriate method and
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wat
'Bout damn time... (Score:5, Funny)
...a lawyer was honest enough to carry this title.
(ducks for cover)
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Don't duck! You spoke the truth.
Re:'Bout damn time... (Score:5, Insightful)
My grandmother used to say "you may be right, you can be dead right."
She said it in reference to a specific ancestor who got shot for taking back a saw that was his from a neighbour who borrowed and would not return it. Being right isn't everything in other words, sometimes being alive is good too.
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IIRC its in a museum as his death caused the first "white man" graveyard to be built on Manitoulin Island [wikipedia.org].
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You're obviously confused. Lawyers are vampires not pirates.
But does that make them...? (Score:2)
So are they vampire ghosts or ghost pirate or vampire pirate ghosts?
Bah, screw it... I don't think the warezwolves care anyways.
Re:'Bout damn time... (Score:5, Funny)
Badass Beckerman does have a nice ring to it...
And yet transsexuals cannot change gender freely (Score:5, Interesting)
In Sweden if you're trans and want to change to a name of the different gender you need approval from social servcies, which among other things requires you are sterile. Yet a lawyer can add "Pirate" to his first name without the agencies even checking the identity of the applicant. Hurra fÃr myndigheter!
Re:And yet transsexuals cannot change gender freel (Score:4, Funny)
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Hurra fÃr myndigheter!
Is that Swedish for, "You magnificent bastard! I salute you!"
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The Poem of the Day (Score:3, Funny)
Please excuse this poem, which some could argue is cornier than a corn cob...
The Lawyer who turned Pirate:
There once was a lawyer from Switzerland
Who was paid to take things hand over hand
When someone called the kettle black
And at this lawyer took a whack
He's now known as part of a pirate band.
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Funny poem for sure, but the guy in the story is from Sweden. Nice job though.
The last line of TFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
mentions an official stating his name will be reverted "in due time"
What are they waiting for? Oh! That's right... an anonymous application!
On the note of applications, this article will probably precipitate a flood of similar immature requests. Maybe the department should suspend applications for a short while until appropriate changes in the procedure are put in place. Hopefully, it doesn't require any legislation and is simply a directive from some official to change the policies.
Cheers!
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Yeah, but this is a government bureaucracy, so they would stop accepting changes just before processing his to have his name fixed...
Dear Mr. Ponten (Score:5, Funny)
A bit childish, but... (Score:2)
I do enjoy the sight of Henrik's... sorry... Pirate's nice anti-piracy Gestapo leather coat.
obligatory xkcd reference (Score:2, Funny)
Patches.. (Score:2)
Maybe he could change his last name to "Patches" so his name will be Patches Pirate.
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Change it Back? (Score:2)
.
.
.
(Wait for it...)
Haaaaarrd!
It Fits (Score:4, Insightful)
Pirate? (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't it make more sense to change it to "Ninja"?
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Ninja Lawyer!
You turn your back, and when you look again at your desk you you see a stack of papers. You've been served, Ninja Lawyer style.
Ninja Lawyer does not argue cases with words. Ninja Lawyer is never seen in the courtroom. Ninja Lawyer dismantles the defense's case with poison darts to the necks of the attorneys thrown from a hidden vantage point. On the dart in the lead attorney's neck is a note which says, in beautiful calligraphy, "the defense rests... in peace".
Ninja lawyer is not technicall
Entirely consistent behavior. (Score:2)
People who don't respect intellectual property would naturally have no regard for another person's interest in the integrity of his or her own name.
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Any pro IP lawyer who has made public statements has already made it clear he has no interest in integrity either his own or that associated with his name.
If I were him... (Score:2)
I'd worry about heading to any hospital.. They've already got the 'Pirate' bit put in the name, the next step is the Anti.. As in "There got Aunty Pirate"..
Snip snip.
Freedom impeded? (Score:2)
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He was a record producer who was convicted on multiple counts of rape.
Re:Someone should (Score:5, Funny)
Even more funny (or tragic) is the reason they found him guilty. Losely translated from my memory:
"The defendant has such peculiar looks that the court finds it unlikely that any young woman would willingly have sex with him."
I agree with the stand up comedian that later stated, "It must be hard having a court judgement declaring that you *are* ugly". No question about it. No doubts. You are legally declared ugly.
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Losely translated
There have been many people who use "loose" where they've meant "lose", but I think this is the first time someone has made this stupid mistake in the reverse.
He didn't mean that. (Score:2)
How do you know he didn't mean "lossily" ;-)
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Sorry, but no mistake.
Here in Sweden it is illegal using twin vowels and now that everything we write or read on the internet is monitored 24/7, I am very careful.
Chances are that I am in big trouble already, for reading your double "o".
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And several of the girls admitted that they had sex with him voluntarily and that they had been pressured by the newspaper (Aftonbladet or Expressen, can't remember which one) to file charges.
The guy has tried to appeal the sentence (he is already out of prison, but he want his name cleared). He basically said that (from my memory): "I know I pressured the girls by false promises and so, and I was a real bastard and an awful person, but I did not commit rape."
The guy was owning a record company, and it was