Pirate Bay Founders’ Prison Sentences Final, Supreme Court Appeal Rejected
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
The damages alone are an insult. Yeah, let's not look at actual damages, let's just use Hollywood fictional bookkeeping.
Today also happens to be the day I've lost access to the Pirate Bay through my ISP because a corrupt judge decided Hollywood profits trump my civil liberties.
It is so very depressing to see how Hollywood has completely corrupted our legal and political systems to the point were civil liberties are being gutted. This can no longer be tolerated.
Remember: the charges and extradition demands against Julian Assange are coming from the Swedish court system as well.
This is the accumulation of decades of US interference in Sweden's sovereignty, resulting in laws and institutions that are in no way serving the Swedish people, nor any particular political ideology. And it is the same all over Europe. Our laws are not our laws. They've been bought and paid for (although not necessarily in cash).
Even if the trial itself was squeaky clean (it most definitely wasn't), and the verdict was a fair interpretation of the current law (highly debatable, but IANAL), the fact remains that these Swedish citizens are convicted for something that would never have been a crime in the first place had the US government and the US entertainment industry not thoroughly corrupted Sweden's legislative process.
More specifically, the US entertainment industry bought the US foreign policy to threaten Sweden with trade sanctions unless... See the wiki leaks files.
Whether you call it corruption or regular diplomatic process is up to you.
On the one hand, there is movie-villain corruption. I pay bribes directly to politicians and law enforcement personnel, then I give them orders, which they follow regardless of the law.
On the other hand, there is a much more common type of corruption through affinity. I run a very lucrative and well-thought-of business in a key industry. I pay lobbyists to obtain access to politicians. Politicians develop an affinity for my interests because they have more exposure to my point of view through lobbying and that is magnified by the positive public perception of my company. Then, when my interests and other people's interests collide politicians (and law enforcement as well, due to similar phenomena) will naturally take my side because they have come to associate my interests with their and society's interests. This extends up to bending the law.
And, of course, there are degrees in between. I not only have fostered an affinity between politicians and my business, I give campaign donations, my lobbyists take you to really fancy meals, I gave a lucrative job to your brother in law, etc.
TPB has hosted torrent files, they were not hosting content, so what they did was perfectly legal.
The verdict of this case, which ignores the facts, shows clear signs of US pressure on the Swedish legal system and politicians there. There is no other explanation.
I think these arguments devalue the situation.
Dancing around a legal loophole in a grey area is fun to watch, but one can't complain when it turns out not to work. We (I) expect others to be judged based on obvious intentions as well. I don't want my gov't to tell me one day that they didn't violate my privacy, they just store some large integer numbers forever, who could blame them for that? They're not my numbers! Or that their CCTV system only compares hashes of faces, so it is legal etc. etc...
The only way to change things is to publicly discuss copyright (and US intervention).
The OP goes to great lengths to emphasize TPB's role in Wikileaks and similar cases, I think this makes more sense as a moral defense.
I don't know Swedish law, but they were convinced of aiding copyright infringement. To me, it is clear they are guilty of that, the whole site is designed for that sole reason of copyright infringement (except perhaps 1% of torrents). Further, the admin do extensive "cleaning" of torrents they deem inapproriate (for example files put in the wrong section), but never clean up copyright infringing files.
Now, you might think that aiding copyright infringement shouldn't be illegal, but if it is, how do the facts speak against the verdict?
Never before in Swedish justice history has this law been applied so rigorously as now. The monopoly mail-delivery system has never been trialed for aiding in spreading of illegal content such as child abuse pictures or bombs.
The messaging system has many uses, the trial did not even take this aspect up for discussion. The servers of thepiratebay where raided and with them several sites where taken down and servers where confiscated, still not returned. Some of those where owned by startup companies and completley unrelated to tpb except for sharing the same server room.
I have no knowledge of Swedish law but this argument sounds to melike you are trying to use a loophole. I don't think you need more than basic common sense to see why TPB is guilty while accusing the ISP or the State is a little far fetched. And if their is no law in Sweden that can make the distinction between the two well, there needs to be one.
You're stressing it for lack of an argument.
There are various levels of aiding. Those you described don't count much. In fact, they are fairly neutral: the "wires", for example, are used for millions of non-copyright-infringement uses.
Your "argument" is akin to saying that the company who made the knife in the first place is as much an aid as the guy that held the man getting knifed to death by his accomplice. And maybe their mothers too, because if they hadn't brought them to life, there would be no murder. Is it too much to ask for people to NOT go making far fetched claims and playing every loophole?
Tired argument's like: "It's not stealing, because you only make a copy", "Google aids copyright infringement too", etc, are 1st grade material, not actual arguments worthy of adults.
I can tell that a movie is, for example, a RomCom by looking at it. How do I know a given copy of a specific 50 Cent video is a copyright infringement?
I mention 50 cent because I understand that various artists have released independently produced videos for general distribution. In addition, labels have done the same thing.
Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, TBP is pretty famous for posting takedown notifications: http://static.thepiratebay.se/dreamworks_response.txt
Classy. Surely they were acting in good faith by defying notification since it referenced US instead of Swedish law. As we all know, the appeals process has just proven "no Swedish law is being violated." It is certainly appropriate for TPB to tell the rights holder to "Go fuck yourself." How dare the rights holder demand that TPB not aid in the piracy of their work while TPB, not the work's creators or investors, profit off it.
</sarcasm> It is beyond me how prevalent the opinion is on HN that this court ruling is corrupt. I don't claim to know every relevant detail of this case or Sweedish law, but IMHO, what TPB currently does SHOULD be illegal. However, it seems to me that this is the minority opinion here.
Instead thepiratebay tended to just laugh, and insult people who sent them letters, claiming what they were doing was perfectly legal. It turns out, it appears, that they were wrong.
Eh, well actually, the whole point is that they were convicted, several times, so it's not 'perfectly legal'. You can call a chair a table, but it's still a table, regardless of your insistence that it's not.
You are saying that never ever innocent people are convicted. We all know this is not true, not by a long shot and in no country.
By definition, when someone is convicted, it's because they did something illegal, at least when all appeals are exhausted.
When deciding on guilt in a criminal case like this one, there are several questions a judge answers before coming to a verdict. I won't go into the details, but the ones you are conflating are "did they do what they were charged with", and "is what they did illegal".
"You are saying that never ever innocent people are convicted."
What? I said no such thing, not even remotely. "When innocent people are convicted", it's because they didn't do what they were charged with, yet a judge thought they did do it. In this case, that question is irrelevant: there is no question on whether they did 'it', just on whether what they did was against the law. You said that it's not, which is nonsense - the fact that several judges said it was, and an appeal was rejected, means that yes, what they did was against the law.
(edit: removed dickish snide remarks)
Legal is a court's decision to make. And they made the inverse decision, i.e that it was illegal.
Hollywood's agenda (censorship, invasive control, panopticon style policing) just happens to coincide with the natural tendency of every government that has ever existed. The framers of our constitution clearly recognized the profoundly human basis for these tendencies, which is why the law specifically designed to constrain them remains valuable (if tattered) more than two centuries after it was written. Indeed, this nasty but relatively stable aspect of human nature is also why we can relate to even older plays written by Shakespeare. He also had an extroridinarly good sense of what makes people, as political animals, tick.
While I agree that corruption is a massive problem, and that Hollywood is a particular nefarious player of that game, I think this issue in particular has a much more sinister undercurrent. In truth, there's a good chance that the government would be inclined to side with maximalist views of IP rights even without the legalized bribery, since they're so convenient to anyone looking for a broader and more pervasive set of police powers, and needing a relatively innocuous excuse for rolling them out.
[1] "70% of early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications" - http://www.anu.edu.au/fellows/jbraithwaite/_documents/Articl...
[2] "half of all the loans called sub-prime, were also liars loans. Liars loans means that there was no prudent underwriting of the loan" - http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/09/william-black...
[3] "how many criminal referrals did the same agency do, in this crisis. Remember it did well over 10,000 in the prior crisis. Well the answer is zero. They completely shut down making criminal referrals" - ibid
[4] "In 2003, Freddie Mac coughed up $125 million after it was caught misreporting its earnings by $5 billion; nobody went to jail. In 2006, Fannie Mae was fined $400 million, but executives who had overseen phony accounting techniques to jack up their bonuses faced no criminal charges. That same year, AIG paid $1.6 billion after it was caught in a major accounting scandal that would indirectly lead to its collapse two years later, but no executives at the insurance giant were prosecuted." - http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-stre...
[1] http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09STOCKHOLM141.html#par12
This means the young adult won't ever go to work because nearly everything he would ever make would be deducted to pay off the fines he can never finish up. Thus he will simply not pay the fine, become unemployed, and make the country pay him social security to live. Any work he will actually do will be gray, i.e. unofficial untaxed "pirate" income that doesn't formally exist. Way to go.
The TPB guys probably have more ambitious plans as the liberation front of bit-sharing. I bet this might just tip an even larger percentage of Swedish people to support TPB and the Pirate Party. Isn't the only thing that is, in the crowds of conservative government or business, more dangerous than a liberty fighter an imprisoned liberty fighter?
Oh please. A bunch of guys who want to download music and videos for free aren't 'liberty fighters'. You can disagree with copyright, or current implementations of copyright, or whatever, but calling activists of marginal issues like this 'liberty fighters' is devaluating the concept of a true 'liberty fighter', much like 'terrorism' has been devaluated to mean pretty much everything that pisses somebody else off.
Having said that, it's still over the top for posting links.
Israelis enjoying life in Swedish prison
Three Israelis jailed in Scandinavian country turn down offer to continue serving their sentence in homeland, explain 'here we are treated with steaks, sex and private television airing World Cup games for free'
This sort of speculation is meaningless.
https://www.flashback.org/t402278
For those of you who don't read Swedish, it's a thread about how anakata, one of the founders, talks about going AWOL from the Swedish bureaucratic system.
Utan känt hemvist == no known place of residence.
That's debatable. Not that I'd want them to run, but getting caught is in no way a certain thing.
It seems romantic in spy books, but I doubt the reality is very satisfying way to live your life.
I don't like the MPAA, RIAA and others either, but sites like the TPB are not helping matters.
You're missing the point that TPB is a global thing. Sure, what they're doing is illegal in America, and an American would be in big trouble and the site would have been shut down long ago. That's great. Good for America.
TPB represents the rest of the world standing up and saying "You know what America, stop coming over to our countries and telling us what to do. We're sick of it."
Before TPB, every foreign site would give up and co-operate at the tiniest threat from the American legal system and law enforcement. For years TPB was the only site/group with the guts to stand up and say "no thanks" when threatened.
For those of us outside America, that really means something.
I honestly think sites like wikileaks, etc. would not exist without the guts and determination shown by TPB
Say that you're riding in the car with a friend when he suddenly pulls over. He looks at you and says, "I'm going to rob that bank over there." If you do nothing to stop him you become an accessory to that crime—and can be convicted by the judge for it.
What is claimed in the discussion here is that TPB is an accessory. They had knowledge but did nothing about it, and cannot be held accountable for their users, right? Arguably, since TPB created a site to share torrents on and had no piracy policy (but taunted everyone that complained) they become accomplices! They help the end-pirate find where to get his contraband.
We aren't talking about MegaUpload. At least with MegaUpload they can argue that there is no description of the file, and no way for them to inspect the data. No, we're talking about a site where it FLAT OUT SAYS that "this torrent has the cracked version of ..." or of a movie that hasn't been released yet.
Did you ever see a warning banner for piracy? Or a "warning, you must be 18+ to pirate these files?" So TPB can't be an accessory, and they can't be uninvolved. Just like you'd be held accountable if you handed a bully a baseball bat.
Oh, yeah, but that's US law. And US pressure on a foreign power. I agree with the anti-RIAA and anti-MPAA and anti-Hollywood sentiments expressed ... but when it comes down to a foreign country harboring pirates and saying, "Sorry, we can't do anything about it: it's legal here." Do you think that ANY world power would just drop it? Of course the US pressured Sweden to prosecute a group harming its economy/trade interests.
I can't believe how many here are defending TPB.
Countries have pressured other sovereign powers before, and the US is just following in the global-political norm. The fact that pressuring a foreign power is done should not upset you as much as the fact that the Swedish government caved to it.
Expecting the US government/embassy not to pressure a foreign power over something that it perceives as being illegal, and if not illegal then something exceedingly close, is illogical. Politics is looking out for one's own interest. And it is in the interest of the US government to push prosecution of foreign pirates, whether they are digital or Somali, so that a "US industry" can thrive.
I personally hate Hollywood and watch less than 10 movies a year (most of them are older and gotten from the library). However, I can't disagree with my government in that the founders of TPB got what they justly deserved.
Globalization of corporations and corporate interest profits the corporations, not the citizens. Not ever.
>The fact that pressuring a foreign power is done should not upset you as much as the fact that the Swedish government caved to it.
By your logic, when a 6'10 300lb strong man threatens to snap your arm off if you don't willingly give him your money, it's your fault for giving it to him, not his fault for threatening. That's crazy.
Just because the 300lbs strong man (The USA) is much bigger and stronger than the average Joe (country), it doesn't mean they should be allowed to go around threatening whenever they please to further their own interests, with blatant disregard for others.
[1] http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/05/1539230/us-threatens-...
Back on topic: The US is already entrenched in foreign intervention through anti-terrorism, anti-genocide, anti-torture, maintaining cheap and sustainable oil prices (and other imported and exported goods), anti-drug-running, and even "spreading/encouraging democracy/freedom".
I admit that enforcing intellectual property doesn't appear too far off from these, but I think there is a crucial difference: these existing interferences benefit most people in America (spreading democracy and fighting druglords is debatable) while the intellectual property interferences benefit a single, dying, hated industry (and that benefit is also very debatable).
Most people are upset because the gains (to "Big Media") do not seem worth the cost of foreign entanglements and limitation of free speech (domestic and abroad).
You are exactly correct about the US's activity in foreign interventions. I would say that "we" are very active in that regard. And frankly, I think that we ought to get out of other people's sovereignty and be content with our own. Hence why I support Ron Paul as a candidate.
However, I disagree strongly on one point:
> Most people are upset because the gains (to "Big Media") do not seem worth the cost of foreign entanglements and limitation of free speech (domestic and abroad).
The takedown of TPB is not about freedom of speech. They could say whatever they want (and did) without getting taken down. But as soon as they assisted US citizens to commit crimes as defined by the US, the TPB became a target. Any country that has a foreign power aiding its citizens to commit what it perceives as a crime will either: pressure the other country to put a stop to it, or will take internal measures.
As I tried to lay out in my previous post, TPB is in the position of an accomplice, according to US law, and will be targeted by the means the US has at hand. Pressuring a power via the ambassador is rather above-board, compared with the "removal" of Osama bin Laden.
I find the definition of "intellectual property" to be too broadly defined and protected. But piracy is just theft, pure and simple...
Free speech is absolutely an issue here (maybe not the main issue). TPB hosts torrent files. "A torrent is data about a target file, though it contains no information about the content of the file. The only data that the torrent holds is information about the location of different pieces of the target file" [1] This is would be like Joe telling someone how to do something illegal, like how to sneak into a movie theater without paying. You could claim that this would make Joe an accomplice to the person who successfully uses his advice, but others will also claim that Joe still has the right to say it. You may argue that it is what is, and under US law, it means Joe is an accomplice, but others sympathize with Joe. That's why people are defending TPB here. It may perfectly legal what the gov't are doing, but we still don't like it. Even if we agree that TPB is mainly devoted to assisting the infringement of copyrights, the cost/benefit ratio favors "Big Media" way more than anyone else (even combined) and the costs are too Orwellian.
The bigger issue to me though is that this interference is being pushed by companies (in fact, companies that I despise). Like Exxon pushing our gov't to push other countries to do things to maximize Exxon's profits. Or Halliburton. Or Monsanto, etc.
I blame the US (and Sweden) for being weak (and somewhat corruptible) but the real blame is on the MPAA and friends.
Google "black sites". Apparently transporting people to bases in other countries in order to detain and or torture them is ok for the US side... Trying to extradite people who have never been to the US is considered fine too.
I don't care about what industry was affected here - US should have no such control over other countries and no such influence on their legal system.
The interesting detail is that downloading a torrent isn't illegal in some jurisdictions. Charging someone for aiding to a legal behaviour is a stretch that doesn't belong to criminal law.
Except that Hollywood is making more money than ever.
This is about cultural hegemony and economic gatekeepers. Please don't be deluded into thinking it's about law.
Anyway, it's really sad this verdict was given. Linking should not be a crime under any circumstance. And if the current judges think it is, then the laws must be changed to reject that assumption immediately.