Swedish court confirms jail for Pirate Bay cofounder

Freed Swedes

Up with this sort of thing!

*twitches*

"“This is actually a really bizarre step from the Swedish court – he’s found guilty because he can’t defend himself,” Sunde told TorrentFreak. “Way to go, democracy. It will be interesting to see how they will actually try to find him and put him into jail. If he’s not alive – will they put his gravestone into a jail cell for a year?”"

My brain hurts from that statement. I thought it was a pretty well known fact that if your dead you still have to work off your debt to the RIAssA so that the starving artists can buy their gold plated Ferraris and gold plated dinner tables.

The type of work does vary though I'm sure. Just prop up his stiff corpse pointing in a direction and you can have him as a host for any other sad sorry individuals who get nailed for music piracy. This way they will know where the payment drop off area is located so they can pay their fines.

"It all depends on who’s paying the judges.”

That'll win sympathy from the appeals court. NOT.

Stupid Twunt

" "This is actually a really bizarre step from the Swedish court – he’s found guilty because he can’t defend himself,” Sunde told TorrentFreak. "

"can't defend himself" - you mean he's buggered off to evade the consequences of his actions; he dare not appear in court and account for himself / argue his case. Nothing bizarre at all, you can't expect the justice system to let you off because you abscond.

Its War

Its War.

Law is optionally enforced.

The real issue here is not whether they have broken the law or not, but the haphazard enforcement of the law. In the UK, it has been illegal to copy music or films for ANY reason for a long time. Copying music onto an iPod was illegal. Unfortunately, because this would have got in the way of the music industry, everybody declined to enforce this law. It didn't matter if you'd purchased the music or not, just changing it from how you purchased it was the offence. Copying under any guise. So, what's the difference between copying music you've purchased onto an iPod and 'copying' music from the internet? Morally, a whole lot. However, as far as the laws concerned, it's just the same and both are illegal.

How then, can one be prosecuted, whilst the other isn't? You either enforce the law or you don't. You can't pick and choose when to enforce and when not to. That simply means the law is up for purchase, whether due to someones power, wealth or whatever; normally both.

Also, there are various laws in this country about running cartels, closed business practices etc.etc. IBM was a very famous company that fell foul of just this sort of law in the States some decades ago now. Don't try telling me the music and film industry aren't guilty in exactly the same way, so why aren't they being taken to task? They change medium from record and tape to CD and the price goes up, even though the production cost is less!! They change from VHS to DVD, the same!! It's blatant profiteering and there are laws against that. So, yet again, the powerful and wealthy buy the laws they want and when they want them enforced.

Now, a very powerful medium (computers) has been put in the hands of the victims and it would be unrealistic to expect them not to use it. Not matter what happens, the film and music industries can never put the genie back in the bottle, not matter how hard they try. They will loose......eventually. It's just how much pain and suffering that occurs in the meantime.

I don't concur with what TPB did, but when the law is so blatantly enforced in a one way manner, what else are people to do? Ernest Saunders even managed to perform what medical science believes is a miracle and yet they didn't seek to reimprison him. Why not? The justice system (stupid name given how it works) hounds people forever for a purely financial loss and yet people who have caused untold deaths through lies (step forward Tony Blair) get clean away with it...........

Law is what you pay for

The idea of the law being some kind of absolute arbiter of good and evil is a nice concept but isn't how real life works. Law is a mutable, flexible, thing and what you get is pretty much dependent on what you pay for.

I'm still not clear what the Pirate Bay are guilty of (apart from having a cheeky name) and its not clear to me how they could have caused millions of dollars in losses (since there's been no sudden jump in publishing profits since they were closed down). I figure they're getting screwed over "just because" -- they offended the Law of Property and as a principle they need to be slapped down -- hard -- 'pour encourager les autres'.

(The Law of Property says something to the effect that everything that exists is owned by somebody (else) and if you're not paying rent then you're a criminal....or worse...)