50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped | Hacker News Reader

50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped

torrentfreak.com

84 pointsazharcs18 comments

At this speed this trial will be over by the end of next week. But I think that will only lead to them trying again with a new batch of evidence.

Not sure on Swedish law & double jeopardy.

The funniest thing about this whole trial and the way it has been conducted by the prosecution so far is that if they wanted to help tpb to become even bigger then they could probably not have done a better job, people that never even knew it existed are now getting exposed to it in very large numbers.

If this goes on for a bit tpb will be somewhere in the top 50, right now they are nudging a top 100 position.

If they can't make it stick this will be the end of copyright as we know it, accelerated by a very incompetent prosecutor. Boy will the *aa be happy.

May be this is their evil plan - make The Pirate Bay SO popular, that it won't be able to handle the load and will eventually collapse under it's own weight :)

I guess they haven't heard of http://highscalability.com/

Excellent point, why didn't I think of that right away :)

Or, even more evil, they hope the owners will pull the plug during an attack of extreme anxiety, brought on by the increase in media attention. Or that they will go away when they've made enough money. Your train of thought opens up interesting possibilities...

Well obviously the owners of TPB bribed some government officials into prosecuting now with bad evidence and an inept prosecutor in order to preempt other possible cases in the future.

Once they are cleared, they will have precedent on their side in any future cases. Quite genius really... vaccinating the court system in a sense.

Hmmm... that sounds like the premise of a new John Grisham book :~).

I am pretty sure that TPB is not going to go away after "making enough money" or getting all the media attention they want. They want to "win", which probably means they will fight until traditional media formats die out. (Which I see as a great thing, FWIW.)

errm... yes, we got that :)

Not sure on Swedish law & double jeopardy.

Is this a criminal or a civil case? If it's the latter I'd assume that double jeopardy doesn't apply.

Either way the prosecution can add more evidence in an appeal.

So after two years of planning they drop half the case after just one day in court?

But that allowed them to say TPB did awful things during these two years ;)

Spectrial indeed.

if you are going to sue for millions, shouldn't you get a lawyer who understands technology?

I guess they got used to all those cases suing 12 year olds

Spot on, that's the first time that they take on a technically competent group that is being helped by an even larger group. In many ways that's the SCO trial revisited, I wonder how that would have turned out if groklaw had not existed.

It's ironic that the MPAA and RIAA's lawyer lackeys thought they could argue convincingly on technology against a group that's been doing this longer than they've likely used a computer.

It's the whole DRM vs crackers in games. All the scene members have been cracking DRM since it came out, all the people making the DRM have been doing it anywhere between 0 and 2 years. It's an unfair battle and companies don't get that they've already lost. The only reason why Apple succeeded so well with its DRM is that no one was used to the technology, Apple came out with a competent DRM to begin with so the crackers didn't get step by step challenges.

And even worse, crackers do it as a hobby. DRM makers just do it as a job, so they have less incentive to make their DRM innovative. Crackers will see a hard to crack DRM, and view it as a challenge and a reason to get excited. When the iphone was cracked, the kid got news coverage worldwide.

it's not just that crackers are more experienced. DRM only needs one person to crack it for a total failure. The first person to crack it distributes it to everyone else without the DRM. DRM only works on the non tech savvy. And those are the people who are unlikely to steal your stuff anyway.

My favorite part of that article is the "EPIC WINNING LOL" quotation sourced from Twitter.

I love New Media.

more news about this:

http://www.thelocal.se/17640/20090217/

Swedish news coverage, note the *AA spokespersons doublespeak.

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