Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines It's official - the four defendants in The Pirate Bay versus entertainment industry trial have been found guilty in a Swedish court of being accessories to breaching copyright laws. The verdict was handed down to four men behind the notorious BitTorrent tracker site this morning in a court in Stockholm. "The Stockholm …
"Sorry but I think thats a good verdict! "
Troll
"After all, wouldnt you want the guy who told the robber where you keep your spare key to also get done!?"
Appeal to emotion
"Downloading copyrighted material is stealing"
Unsupported assertion
Which pretty much sums up the argument for Intellectual Property.
http://www.domstol.se/default____124.aspx
find somewhere to comment, post millions of torrent links, and watch them convict themselves.
As many a person has said before about the trial, the internet is based upon links... if they are making it illegal to link to copyrighted materal, where will this actually stop? Personally... I could somewhat agree if someone was actually prosecuted for DOWNLOADING copyrighted material, i agree, that is stealing... but linking doesn't equal downloading.
A bit of a jump I know, but its getting as bad as the anti-terror laws here in the UK. Now photographing a police officer gets you stopped incase you are a terrorist? wow, so... everyone at G20 including all the official news teams are out to sabotage the UK... loving the logic.
It is such a shame the internet has come to this, I vote we all join up to that VPN service mentioned a while ago purely for torrents, then we can give them the middle finger once and for all!
This trial took place in the lowest court possible -- which has some kind of a jury system. The participants of this jury are selected from retired local politicians. So in 9 out of 10 times they always rule conservatively, against the defendant. These sentences almost always get appeal to the next higher court because of the incompetence of the jury and because they're politically slanted.
To sum this up: THIS SENTENCE MEANS NOTHING!
I'd say that what they re doing is slightly different than google tbh ... Google searches everything on the internet, it doesn't search for a specific thing....whereas The Pirate Bay was specifically designed to search for torrents. so it is different slightly....
However, saying that , what Ian posted is absolutely correct. The trial couldn't have been done any better by the Carry on Film / Monty Python teams ... I can't see how the case wasn't dismissed until the prosecution could actually get a case built ... I've never heard of any instance of this type of farcical prosecution before lol ...
I'm sure they'll get the right to appeal correctly & any competent judge would surely agree that the first trail was a farce order a retrial or ..... hopefully acquit the accused =p
Paris: Because her torrents aren't copyrighted ;)
There is something very abhorrent about Google making a fortune out of advertising driven by material in breach of copyright, and using what is to me a loophole in the law to say "If you want to do something about all our breaches of your copyright that we are making money from, you are going to have to increase your overheads to monitor our site, and only then we might consider doing something about it"
Google is so very rich, and the content providers (yes even the Record companies and newspapers) so very much smaller and less affluent, so something is way out of kilter. Natural justice suggests it should be youTube's responsibility to proactively keep their site content legal. If its costs them too much - well maybe they don't have a business model after all!
"Downloading copyrighted material is stealing no matter how rich the company is you are stealing from."
Stealing involves permanently depriving someone of something. So, kindly name the thing which you used to have before I made a copy of your copyrighted work, which you don't have afterwards. Or shut up. Your choice.
"This is good news for everyone, in Sweden and internationally, who is making a living or a business from _raping consumers and artists_ and who needs to know their _pillaging_ will protected by law.”
Fixed that for you...
As For Lee Jackson's Comments (Lee Jackson as in did music for Duke Nukem 3D, perhaps?), Two points:
- "Stealing" is when you take something from somebody and they no longer have it. You can't "steal" something intangible.
- Ignoring point 1, Charging AU$80 for a game and $30 for a CD or DVD is rape. Pure and simple. Rape is worse than theft. When you stop trying to rape me, maybe I'll stop "stealing" from you.
...people have been putting forward cogent arguments and counter-arguments, logical and often well-reasoned posts about how these people should or should not be prosecuted but really they're all a waste of time. There is no law in the world now, can't you all see that? Whoever has lots of money, power, political influence will win, full stop. It doesn't matter if there's no case to answer, no evidence, other rulings that negate the prosecution's case, logic, reason, right, wrong; there is only ever going to be one winner. The judges, the press, the politicians, the police, all work at the behest of large corporations and influential pressure groups, (no points for guessing which particular branch of political meddlers will have supported the big Hollywood studios...and we all know about their global reach and subsequent compliant media whitewash).
These are the darkest days in the history of man, because there is no law now and no means of fighting those who have slowly but surely come to power behind the various puppet governments of America and the UK, etc. You can't protest, you can't organise yourselves as before to form a militia to disrupt and overthrow, you are being watched constantly, your web browsing and emails are recorded and monitored.
There will be a lot of people out there saying "Good! Serves 'em right" and simultaneously saying they haven't got a problem with how the world is going, and nothing to fear if you've got nothing to hide, etc (ah to live a life completely through euphemism) which is bully for them...until the powers that be do something that THEY don't like...or make something illegal that THEY like to do. And they'll turn around and suddenly realise that they too are powerless to stop it or fight it or to argue with law and reason and logic, because it's too late, we're already screwed.
</rant>
This is not wholly surprising. First tip is if you want to produce a site to aid people in the unauthorised downloading of copyright material and you want to use the defense that it is just intended to help people find legitimate material, then best think about plausible deniability from the beginning. Calling something "Pirate Bay" looks like a deliberate provocation and hardly helps their case.
Secondly, all those arm chair lawyers (with which this site abounds), the actual operation of law does not revolve around your "how many angels can stand on the head of a pin" bits of sophistry. There are things like intent and even common sense taken into account. Not always - like the stupid ruling of a German court that Google image thumbnails breached copyright rather than being fair use. But what you can't rely in is so little bit of sophistry such as this has a legal use. I've no doubt you could use the butt of a handgun to drive in nails, but that isn't going to look too convincing in a court of law.
As for carrying this principle forwards to Google - well I think not, at least as far as criminal sanctions go. Google is clearly a general purpose search engine and used mostly for legitimate purposes. I think the worst that could happen is some authority somwhere imposing conditions on Google to not give links to sites which are breaching copyright. Very difficult to police of course.
However, in one sense it doesn't matter much, apart from the consequences for the defendents in this case. Technology will move on and later generations of file sharing will get more and more difficult to close down, as they will be inherently decentralised and will also use other tricks to avoid users being tracked.
Without piracy there would be no iPods, no MySpace, no MP3 players, no YouTube, no internet radio, no iTunes. Hell, the mp3 format would just be an off-comment in a mailing list somewhere. If nobody broke the law the music industry would have absolutely no reason to innovate, and they have proven quite comprehensively that they have no intention of doing so and would stuff the mp3 genie back in the bottle if they could.
If everyone obeyed the law 100% we would still be using CD walkmans to listen to music on overpriced, monopolised, silver discs.
It's simple capitalism, with piracy as a factor. If you do not provide what your customers want they will go to the competition. Piracy is a major problem because the industry wants to define the needs of the customers like they always used to, but no longer can through technology.
While big business hates it it is essential for customers as it drives down prices and creates competition where none previously existed due to monopoly.
If people were not seeking to illegally download copyright material, why would they need links to where it was held ?
In that respect TPB were providing a service to facilitate the illegal downloading of copyrighted material.
How would TPB be judged were it not links to illegal material but a directory of assassins and hit men ? The principles of the case and defence would be identical. Against "Free Speech" comes responsibility; TPB seem to believe they had an inalienable right of the former and none of the latter, the court saw it differently.
The real question now is how the judgement affects others who provide such links, individuals and some well known search engines. Search engines at least have an additional defence over TPB that they never set out with the intent to provide such links which would probably make a lot of difference.
It's to do with the faith in which the material is carried, Google is a search index of pretty much everything, in that respect google search could be considerred neutral, sure some of links that a google search might return may be links to copyright material that has been placed on the web without the appropriate authority, but google's not explicetly encouraging such information. TPB was biased towards copyright violation, and by their self chosen name appeared to condone piracy.
Also is a tracker really the same as a search engine? A search engine provides a list of fuzzy-matched resources for a query, based on the content of those resources on the last occaision that they were scanned. A tracker allows distributors of a specific resource (a particular file) to register, (rather than being scanned) and then provides a real time list to clients that exactly request that resource. I'll be interested to see how sites like XTVI fare.
I think a few people would do well to sit and think
"when I hit 40 to overtake that ka, I was for a few seconds, speeding."
"when I post to the reg I'm skiving from work." (Which I am, right now!) and
"when I warez stuff, I may be breaching copyright" (Which I have.)
And reflect that they aren't spotlessly white, but it's a shade of grey most people don't mind.
I'd still be pissed off If I ended up in a prison cell that a drug dealer should be occupying though!
Just a question, Did the convicted have day-jobs or did they proffit from TPB?
Given the amount of time and effort the media moguls have invested in trying to shut down one torrent tracker (and failed, if the site continues to operate while its founders are in jail), I don't think isohunt, torrentz, torrentscan, torrent-search-bar, torrent-finder and all the other sites returned by entering the phrase "torrent search" into a well known general purpose search engine have much to fear.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if someone decides to set up a distributed open-source tracker network, spread across different servers in different countries, owned by different people. That would be almost impossible to shut down as if one node 'failed', all the others would still be operational.
Is this really the end or is it another false dawn like the downfall of Napster? Maybe it'll just mean lesser sites will pick-up if Pirate Bay closes. Or maybe downloaders will develop different smarter technology. Taking on Pirate Bay is one thing. Taking on Google is quite another.
I don't think anyone is going to argue that they aren't guilty of "being accessories to breaching copyright laws". Clearly they are.
However the double standards applied are the problem, as all and sundry have pointed out, google must be next. having one rule for those with power and one rules for those without is not a good precedent to set.
That a swarm of gun-toting officers will soon be raiding my local library and dragging away the old dear that works there, as she provides DVDs for rent (she even CHARGES for the ability to take it away and copy it! Talk about proceeds of crime!), and even has a photocopier to make copies of printed copyrighted works ON-SITE!
Surely an appeal will get this overturned as the biggest pile of horseshit ever to come out of a trial-room.
Yes I agree, stealing in any capacity is wrong. Yes you would want action against the person that told the robbers where the spare key was, just like all parents of peados should be thrashed and castrated for bringing them into the world (a little too far perhaps...?). However let's take a step back and be realistic. This is the internet, TPB are just listing torrents placed there by others, they are not actually doing the illegal bit (the uploading and downloading). Then there is the scenario I had just recently in a house move...a few CDs were trashed beyond repair in an (admittedly rather foolish) box stacking and collapsing incident. I am not paying again to listen to music I own. Some of that was older stuff and not actually on my current MP3 playlist...due to laziness and not being bothered to copy my entire CD collection. So I grabbed a copy...I haven't done anything wrong, I had the CDs and paid for them, I can make backups of that material but hadnt, luckily someone else had and so I took a copy of their backup and now they are on my mp3 list and I actually bought a newer album they did because of my rejuvenated feelings for their music. Would never have happened if it weren't for TPB, so the RIAA can knock £7.99 off that total amount for lost business as they actually gained some.
Secondly with all this 'digital distribution' arsery that seems to be sweeping the world. I buy my copy of said music/game/movie and the provider goes tits up (yep blame the current Brown economic policy...why not) . If my hard drive dies what am I supposed to do? Buy it again from a different provider? I think not. Oh hello bit torrent...tada my game/movie/CD is back. Other advantages to torrented material are no intrusive and annoying DRM on games which they are still insisting on using, hell I wish I could pay for a cracked version of a game over the retail release most of the time because it means I can install and play it when I like, not when Steam/Impulse/etc says their servers are able to accomodate my connection.
Stealing = bad. I think we all know that. Money hungry corporations operating outside the correct legal parameters = worse. But we all know the future will be run by corporations and not governments, do you think Jaqui Smith came up with the national dataspy? nope she was probably requested to bring it into play over a nice fully complimetary meal and a fat sack of free porn which she then went on to try and claim back anyway. As a famous nobody once said to me over tea in the park, "Proof of the greed is in the scandals."
Thank the-non-existant-god-that-may-exist-depending-on-religion-and-attitude-towards-being-victimised-by-anyone-that-doesnt-agree-with-you that Google (and others) is still linking to these areas of 'legitimate backups' so lazy people like me can recover lost CDs, etc without having to re-purchase.
A sad day for the people of Earth. I hope we get a bank holiday in 50yrs time when the revolution comes.
As El Reg has not provided TPB's comments, here is...
"So, the dice courts judgement is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict.
But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That's the only thing hollywood ever taught us."
via... http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009epicwinanyhow.php
Or perhaps it could point to the fact that they were so legally indefensible even incompetents could prove them guilty?
One can only hope that the content owners now step up to the plate and start taking digital distribution more seriously. This particularly applies to the distribution of content that is physically (digitally?) not accessible to you no matter what you do - things like TV shows. If no network wants to show something in your area, sell it to us directly for God's sake!
Google, it could be argued has substantial non-infringing uses. The fact that it may throw up links to torrents of copyrighted material is unfortunate, but that is not its raison d'etre. This is not a defence open to The Pirate Bay. In the first page of hits for 'Browse Movies' at the moment I see Watchmen, Hotel for Dogs, Monsters vs. Aliens, Tropic Thunder, Wolverine...
Despite the plucky rhetoric of the PB apologists, the Pirate Bay exists purely as a resource to enable unprincipled cheapskates to enjoy the product of other people's labours, without any intention of rewarding those labours. Forget the spiel about 'new business models', if this becomes the dominant paradigm for 'consuming culture' then culture will simply not be created - you can play the well-worn card about the ridiculous salaries afforded to the big stars and I'd have a modicum of sympathy, but sets will not be built, lights will not be rigged, sound will not be designed and costumes will not be made if the relatively lowly people involved are not paid. And it's hard to see how the "business model" espoused by PB advocates will pay them. Maybe I'm missing something.
I find it hard to believe this judgement was arrived at in accordance with jurisprudance, and that's far more worring than the actual result.
If the case against them was good then fine, but it was a very badly constructed case and the actual offence "being accessories to breaching copyright laws" is so 1984 I think they are breaking Orwells copyright
A sad day for the law
Yes but you can't force the music industry to sue Google. That's the problem with letting sorting stuff out like this with private lawsuits - the law will be applied unevenly and certain unlucky sorts will be made examples of. It's not like the state is prosecuting someone for a crime, they aren't allowed to pick and choose who they put in court for real crimes (at least in theory).
Paris coz she loves a good torrent.
nothing really changes torrent sites come and go, (good job I dont use torrents really) but people still download what they want because they want to try it, sometimes I download something like it and buy the original, most of the time I decide it was a waste of bandwidth and delete it. Ether way from me piracy increases legal revenue from me because I just wouldnt buy it at all if I couldnt see if I liked it or not.
Oh well anyways back to my downloading still got another 50+ gig to grab today :)
I disagree, I wouldn't say it was a good verdict. But for reasons mentioned previously rather than any freetard reasons. The prosecution presented an abysmal case, and won purely on their statement that what TPB was doing was wrong.
Their illustration of how TPB differs to Google must have been pretty soul destroying for the Lawyer presenting it.
Why should the linking be stopped? I'm not going to argue it's about free speech, but where do we stop? The internet as a whole works largely on the basis of links, do you really fancy being in a position where you would somehow have to prove that you didn't know something was copyrighted? Would that even be an adequate defence?
The thing about copyright is it encompasses a good many things, say you read an article that you really like, so you link to it. If that article has been ripped off from someone, then working by this judgement you could also be at risk.
I download my music legally, but only because I have finally managed to find a site that is convenient and doesn't try and enforce formats/DRM onto me. OK so i can't get my music in OGG but at least there's no DRM.
[ Vaguely related Anecdote]
A while back I was searching for a track, didn't know the name of it, but could describe where I'd heard it. Eventually I found it on Amazon, available for download. But only to US customers. Armed with the name I looked for a UK site ...... Nothing.
In the end I used a proxy to make myself look like a US customer. Was this illegal? Probably. But most people would have just gone to BitTorrent once they tired of looking.
[/Vaguely related Anecdote]
Why should I not be able to obtain music when i want it, in the format I want it? This is the one reason I would use P2P etc. If you can't make it available the way I wan't it, I'll find it in that format - DRM free.
It's been mentioned before, but copyright infringement is not theft by definition. You are making a copy and therefore not depriving the owner of anything. Not that it affects the rights and wrongs, but I wish people could ge thteir facts straight. Comparing copyright infringement to Piracy makes a mockery of the hell people who have run ins with real pirates endure.
I did kind of see this judgement coming, but I also wholly believe that the judgement means nothing. TPB will continue, people will continue to use it, if TPB was to vanish something else would appear.
If the IFPI et al would fix the cause rather than trying to nuke the symptoms then perhaps things might change
As much as i think the verdict in this theatre showtrial is a fudge designed to send out a no-copying message on behalf of a doomed 20th century corporate media industry that looks increasingly desperate in its bid not to lose its control over content distribution - the defendants did themselves no favours with their cocky "f**k you" attitude.
If they had been seen to be willing to collaborate with copyright holders when they requested takedown notices their defence would have been much stronger. Offering to introduce an anti-copyright system that would block certain content from the tracker - based some ineffective filtering strategy - would have rendered the case much more difficult for the prosecution.
Google collaborates with copyrights holders - thats what makes them different from TPB who basically just said we don't care what people use our service for...
The difference is when Google are informed they're linking to illegal content, they remove it. These guys didn't, and they didn't take reasonable steps to ensure no further illegal content was posted.
I don't know how it works in Sweden but in the UK both of these steps would be necessary to avoid being charged (at least with libelous content online, which I have some legal experience with :-)
I'm going to reply but perhaps not in the way you might expect
Yes the pirate bay is guilty of providing an index to copyright material
We all know they are no matter how we all despise the record/movie companies
(tell me again in the days of globalisation, why a US movie DVD should cost 50% of a UK movie DVD when they both come from the same plant in China and why exactly are they released at different times?)
However, a little experiment a minute ago with google of typing "torrents+black+sabbath" into the search bar brings me up pages of links to copyright material...... which is exactly what PB were doing........
There google are guilty of the same offence... but wont be dragged through the courts because they can afford better lawyers than the media industry
You miss the point Lee. Copyright infringement is not something you should be locking people up for. Nobody can ever prove that a download is a lost sale. The media companies see that for example 1000 people have a copy of their song and therefore that is 1000 lost sales.
If you are looking to download something that surely means you are either unable to pay for it or unwilling?
Copying albums and software is what some people will do and have been doing for years. Compilation tapes between friends etc.. The media companies always see these as lost sales and who remembers the "Home taping is killing music" adverts of old? yet 25 years alter the media companies are now blaming the Internet.
We don't need these media giants, they are just miffed because people are no longer willing to pay the excessive prices they charge and they've had to lower prices.
It seems that no body can get away from the evil wrath of the U.S.A these days. They put pressure on others to abide by their laws and yet when they break them we can't do anything?
Is there anybody who doesn't know that torture is going on in an American facility? and yet we can do nothing against that?
Piracy does kill the market but it was the way this trial was conducted that annoyed me.
Why should pop stars get millions and millions of pounds anyway, we need to change the way we think and allow all sorts of free bands to surface and get rid of all the crap that we see today. Piracy will pave the way for a new type of consumerism in the end anyway.
(Pirates because we are all Pirates at heart)
Isn't it possible to make a torrent of a torrent (etc, ad infinitum) which uses The Onion Router for access? Such that sites like Pirate Bay become torrents themselves? No fuc*ker knows where they are?
Dunno - I'm no whiz*.
Just seems the Pigopolists got nasty, having had their noses well-and-truly rubbed in it with the "DVD Jon" episode.
* Moderatrix - Can we have an "I might be talking out of my arse" icon? (T'is Friday, and I've been in my "Living room" for awhile. You know the one, 150 yards away from my bedroom, equipped with pool table, juke box, plasma TV, pretty Vietnamese girl opening a beer for me, etc...)
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