Wow. This is has probably been one of the most corrupt legal processes Western Europe has seen since WWII. Unbelievable how a foreign industry has made a complete mockery out of the justice system of a sovereign nation.
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.
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.
> They've been bought and paid for (although not necessarily in cash).
More specifically, the US entertainment industry bought the US foreign policy to threaten Sweden with trade sanctions unless... See the wiki leaks files.
"From having the minister of justice pressured by the US to illegally make a case of TPB, through the police officer responsible for the investigation (Jim Keyzer) “just happened” to get a job at Warner Brothers the weeks before I myself got promoted from a witness to a suspect, to the judges in the court cases being either board members, or in one case the actual chairman of the board, for the swedish pro-copyright society…"
WikiLeaks has several documents that give details about US embassy pressure towards the Swedish justice system to make legislation and verdicts that favor the US IP Mafia.
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.
Maybe because the facts speak against the verdict?
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.
> TPB has hosted torrent files, they were not hosting content, so what they did was perfectly legal.
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?
Aiding in copyright infrigement, aiding is the key word. The ISPs carrying the signals and the state putting down the wire has been aiding the infrigement. The Linux servers running the torrent site and the collocation facilities are aiding in the infrigement.
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.
>The ISPs carrying the signals and the state putting down the wire has been aiding the infrigement.
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.
Yes, you can argue that every part is technically aiding. But the thing is, legality also considers intent and awareness. The Pirate Bay was clearly intended for pirate material (how you prove that is another point..) and they were very much aware that the majority of torrents pointed towards pirated material.
Aiding in copyright infrigement, aiding is the key word. The ISPs carrying the signals and the state putting down the wire has been aiding the infrigement. The Linux servers running the torrent site and the collocation facilities are aiding in the infrigement.
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 disagree. I'm definitely an adult and I don't think copyrighte infringement is stealing. We can have an intelligent discussion about the morality of copyright infringement, but calling it stealing is spinning.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, because TPB believes that all of its torrents are potentially legitimate (50 cent has released videos for general distribution after all). I'm sure if they were ever notified by rights holders that they were hosting a torrent that was aiding in the infringement of protected works, they would surely "clean" it up. After all, I can tell that a movie is, for example, infringing by looking at a takedown notification.
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.
Well, when someone e-mails you, telling "transformers 3", in your film category, is in fact transformers 3, and ask you to take it down, you could do so.
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.
"TPB has hosted torrent files, they were not hosting content, so what they did was perfectly legal."
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're confusing two different things. One is the question of innocence/guilt (did you do X) the other is the question of legal/illegal (is it legal to do X). If you're found guilt of murder, that obviously doesn't mean that you committed a murder, but it does mean that murder is considered illegal.
"You are using circular logic here: "They were convicted and that's proof that what they did is illegal.""
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.
If you honestly think this is just about Hollywood, you're not being cynical enough.
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.
You can still access The Pirate Bay from behind Ziggo and XS4all by using depiratebay.nl or any of the other proxies listed here: http://www.ikwilthepiratebay.nl/#!proxy
This started already when they raided the NOC where TPB was running in in 2006... no legal justification under Swedish law but that didn't stop them from seizing all hardware there. Well, I am wondering who paid/bribed for that.
[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...
This is very interesting and disturbing, but I fail to see what this has to do with a lawsuit in Sweden. As far as I am aware these two events are unrelated.
Only related in the sense that they reflect US government priorities for white collar prosecution. Their state department has been leaning on Sweden for some time to clean up The Pirate Bay [1]. And there's, of course, the recent MegaUpload news. Copyright enforcement is a critical issue for them, corporate malfeasance is not.
The worst part of this is the assorted fines imposed on the founders of TPB. The prison sentences probably won't amount to much...I don't expect brokep to serve time (I have been following his situation for years now), which is good news.
Exactly. The best way to obliterate a young adult from the society forever is to slash him with fines that he just can't and won't pay. There are several cases like this in Finland, namely few kids who ran a p2p sharing hub (without sharing any of the files, just running the server, AFAIK).
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?
"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.
Perhaps he means liberty in the sense of freedom from being America's lapdog. One might be considered a "liberty fighter" for wanting to be held accountable by their own country's morals and mores, and not at the insistence of another country. The method "free music and videos", might be irrelevant to that perspective.
They can probably file for bankruptcy. The fame they accumulated means they won't have problems borrowing for their future businesses, so a bankruptcy would be a nice way out (obviously after securing their existing assets). IANASwedishL though.
I don't think it's possible to file for personal bankruptcy in Sweden, or at least I think that doing this doesn't cause the debt to disappear. (Norwegian here). Are there any Swedes who can clarify this?
I'm not a Swede, but it looks like you're right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy#Sweden It might be better to enter into a debt arrangement called "skuldsanering" - now that sounds curious :)
Skuldsanering is the Swedish option for personal bankruptcy, but differs in a number of significant ways. First of all you send in an application, disclosing all your debts and assets, and I believe there's an interview process as well. If they think you're hiding something, should reasonably be able to dig yourself out your hole on your own or don't think you've tried hard enough to sort your problems out on your own then you'll get denied. If accepted you have to sell of all your assets and spend the next several years making a good faith effort to earn as much money as you can and pay back as much of the debt as you can. I believe that if they think you're not being serious or not trying they can cancel the deal at any time. Only once all that is done will any remaining debts be cancelled.
At least that was Swedish court. Had it been in the USA they could have faced 4, 6 and 10 years of imprisonment, and $6.8 trillion damage to the RIAA and MPAA.
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'
Hehe, there's this Russian comedy movie "Хочу в тюрму" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167231/) where a guy, after losing his job, sees a TV documentary about European prisons, and decides to go to the Netherlands from Russia specifically to try to get into prison.
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.
That would be the worst response. For the justice system they are now low-profile, minor white-collar thieves, it's all just a bunch of paperwork and bribes, with a bit of lawyering they probably won't even do time. Once they start absconding, they become fugitives and show up on all the wrong radars. Offenses start piling up automatically, and unless they manage to run to Santo Domingo (which would involve more felonies), they will be caught and sent away for years, not months.
It did backfire for the guy who is hiding. The others got their sentences reduced in the first appeal but since he wasn't present for the appeal, his original sentence stands. So he'll basically either have to stay away from any country with an extradition treaty with Sweden for many, many years, or spend a year in Swedish prison (plus, I'm sure, additional time/fines for running).
If you play russian roulette with four friends, it is in no way a certain thing that someone will lose, but given the odds and the stakes, it's best to assume it as a near-certainty.
The difference with Russian roulette is, of course, that your skills/wits make no to very little difference. When trying to avoid the authorities, it does (or at least I'd like to think so). But, like I said, I would not encourage those people to run, my point was more along the lines of "now, now, chaps, let's not get overly dramatic". ;)
Not that I agree with the sentence, but becoming a fugitive is not necessarily a great strategy. These guys are human after all, they probably don't want to live their life hiding underground, never being allowed to travel, always looking over their shoulder.
It seems romantic in spy books, but I doubt the reality is very satisfying way to live your life.
With the ludicrous patent wars going on among the biggest tech players, increasing piracy and ever-increasing cases of countries bending over backwards to placate entertainment industries; the whole Intellectual Property paradigm is ripe for disruption. The sad part is that the prevalent political practices will make it very difficult to come to a reasonable solution, a point of stable equilibrium. Consumer advocacy and freedom rights' groups have a very feeble voice right now and this issue will take a lot of activism and rationality from the common folk before it can reach a sane conclusion. I only hope issue doesn't undo the leaps humanity took when internet was invented (and I'm not exaggerating)!
Am I the only one who doesn't feel bad for these guys? The Pirate Bay was always set up to try to infringe copyright, and I don't consider it a legitimate form of civil disobedience.
I don't like the MPAA, RIAA and others either, but sites like the TPB are not helping matters.
> The Pirate Bay was always set up to try to infringe copyright
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
For hosting file hashes and connecting people with same hashes. For free (only search engine was polluted with ads, you didn't have to use it though). In no way is this comparable to what Megaupload (and others) were/are doing.
We have something in America called "being an accessory" to the crime. This means that you stood by without attempting to stop the crime, even though you learned that it was about to happen.
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.
Rick, I understand that you're upset. But shouldn't you be more upset with the Swedish government than with the US government? Who caved? The Swedes!
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.
We now know thanks to wikileaks that the USA has threatened trade embargos upon smaller countries to get what they want [1]
>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.
I don't agree with trebor here but I have a problem with him being downvoted. He has clearly laid out an intelligent (albeit unpopular) opinion and you may disagree, but why downvote? Maybe if he was factually wrong (he isn't) or not contributing to the discussion (he is) or was in some way offensive (he isn't offending me at least)...
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).
> The US is already entrenched in foreign intervention through anti-terrorism, anti-genocide, anti-torture
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.
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...
I'd rather not debate over whether or not (digital content) piracy is theft, but surely the matter is not "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.
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.
MPAA and RIAA must be trying to change the public's and the politicians' opinion that these "piracy" sites really are really guilty, so they might as well give them the laws they need to bypass due process and "streamline" the whole process, so they don't "waste time" fighting all the similar sites which now we "know" are guilty.
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.
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.