Can torrent sites be prosecuted.

[Calax]

why do I think there will be a mistrial (well there would be if it was in the american system of justice) because the Jurors had already had a conviction before the case was even started and didn't bother to pay attention to the trial itself. (at least that's how I read it)

[alanschu]

Based on a juror falling asleep?

[Calax]

Based on a juror falling asleep?

an arguement could be made (I think) that he didn't get a fair trial by jury because of the fact the juror fell asleep. If that happened to me I'd move to have a trial without a jury

[J.E. Sawyer]

/facepalm

 

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20...s-are-legal.ars

70 to 80 percent of the material was deemed to be legal for sharing, and Kolmisoppi claimed that there was actually a larger proportion of infringing material on YouTube than on The Pirate Bay.

 

Cool. YouTube removes material at the request of rights holders.

 

Kolmisoppi followed these up with a Twitter post. "That was annoying," he wrote. "Now it's certain this #spectrial is political. Anyone hear a question that was not based on ideology?"

 

Here's something non-ideological: if you would like all entertainment material to be created and produced by hobbyists, support the distribution of entertainment products without financial incentives for their creators and producers. Pretty simple. By logical extension, it makes sense that those who perform and facilitate the distribution are also hobbyists and would also not require financial incentive for their services.

[alanschu]

I like how that quote is basically an admission that 20-30% of the the content is illegal, and he even verified it!

 

Posting and ridiculing the letters from license holders asking to remove links is a pretty disingenuous thing to do as well.

[Blarghagh]

In related news, isoHunt is also being prosecuted.

[kirottu]

and Mininova.

 

I guess laws are finally catching up with techonology.

[alanschu]

The Pirate Bay case showed that companies work with Google and Youtube, because they cooperate to remove copyrighted materials.

 

If that holds up for the Pirate Bay case, I'm curious how it will for isoHunt and Mininova.

Edited April 17, 2009 by alanschu

[alanschu]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20...lion-a-year.ars

[Gorgon]

Who's next, google.

 

It's been pretty one sided so far with the copyright holders doing little more than throwing the odd sandbag in the general direction of a deluge. I dunno, I hope they don't win too big. I like the intarweb mostly lawless and wild as opposed to a neatly trimmed suburbia.

 

It's pretty predictable though, whenever a file sharing initiative becomes too popular it inevitably dies. The massive popularity of The Pirate Bay is what generated the pressure for the Swedish government to do something about it.

[alanschu]

Who's next, google.

 

It's been pretty one sided so far with the copyright holders doing little more than throwing the odd sandbag in the general direction of a deluge. I dunno, I hope they don't win too big. I like the intarweb mostly lawless and wild as opposed to a neatly trimmed suburbia.

 

It's pretty predictable though, whenever a file sharing initiative becomes too popular it inevitably dies. The massive popularity of The Pirate Bay is what generated the pressure for the Swedish government to do something about it.

 

 

The thing about Google is, according to copyright holders, they seem to cooperate with requests to remove links to copyrighted content.

[Meshugger]

5) They got the same sentences as one under swedish law would get for aggrivated assault, rape or even manslaughter. No case as i am aware of in Sweden has been sentenced to a fine 8 figures. 5 or 6 are more common.

 

This is interesting. According to swedish law, if someone makes it possible for others, or gives them information on how to commit a crime, it is viewed that same as rapist or a killer.

 

Personally, i don't know. They are of course guilty of making it easier for pirates to get their material, but taking into consideration on how the swedish law is written, i can't help thinking that there were some backroom political reasons behind all this.

 

Their crime was a financially based one. The jail time is rather short, but the fine makes total sense. I'd say it's a pretty fair verdict, to be honest. Hopefully it stands up.

 

I think that you and Enoch are looking into this too much from an anglo-saxon perspective. No rape cases, murder cases or anything dealing heavy damages have had a fine of this calibre in Sweden (afaik). Relatively speaking, the swedish court sees them as the worst of the worst of society, when practically speaking, we are talking about a couple of guys making it possible for others to know where to get the good stuff, with the loss of potential revenue for the other part.

 

No women were abused, no babies killed, no company going under due to fraudelent business practices, no pensions being lost, no prostitutes were beaten and no new addicts created from a new drug.

[Gorgon]

It all depends on how much you have to give, so it does not scale 1:1 with criminal damages for a rape victim.

[alanschu]

I suspect they are getting a fine in lieu of jail time.

[Hurlshort]

Yes, rape and murder deserve considerable jail time. This is basically a white collar crime.

[MacCorp]

I suspect they are getting a fine in lieu of jail time.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30265030/

STOCKHOLM - Four men behind The Pirate Bay, one of the world's biggest free file-sharing Web sites, were each sentenced to a year in jail on Friday for breaching copyright, and ordered to pay $3.6 million in compensation.

I hope its $3.6 million each.

 

Every single movie and music cd/dvd I own is store bought. We need more prison time for them. One year is not enough.

 

Here is the best way to see this: PirateBay is providing the escape car while someone robs a bank or store. They are literally saying, "I will drive the car anywhere in the world. All you have to do is ask, and we will drive you to the door. Don't tell me what your doing, but I have no problem sitting in the driver's seat to transport you." If you think about their car as being a massive vessel (world wide), you can only guess at how many theives they are transporting. They are a accessory to several crimes. We are not talking about a small franchise that does smaller crimes.

Edited April 18, 2009 by MacCorp

[Meshugger]

Oh dear, maybe i was not clear enough, you are all applying what you think should be done according to your standards.

 

According to the swedish verdict of their standards, they are worse scum than those that i mentioned before, thus making this decision look like it was done after political pressure.

 

Of course they are guilty of what they are accused of, and i don't know how exactly they could prove the sums of damages either (i.e. can one correllate the amount of downloads to the potential causation of loss of sales directly? For example would've each downloader have bought the media instead, i sure don't know the measures on how to prove that one true), but i can smell that something is very fishy about this.

[mkreku]

I realize that what the Pirate Bay stands for is not completely legitimate. But even when they are breaking the law, they are giving the small people a voice. Before the Pirate Bay, noone had a chance to oppose the music industry. Even if you wanted just one song, you had to buy an album. An album that cost something like $20-30 in Sweden. Ridiculously overprized. The music industry demanded that everyone followed their rules and paid exuberant prices for their wares. There was no alternatives, no choice, Everyone who wanted to listen to music had to play by monopolistic rules.

 

The Pirate Bay, although illegal, made it clear what people want: if they like one song, they don't want the entire album. With the rise of torrent sites, the small individual got a voice: we don't like the monopoly that the music industry forces on us. We don't like to be forced to buy entire albums because we want one song. We want to be able to transfer the songs we bought to any MP3-player or media player we want. I honestly don't think the music industry would have even jumped on the Ipod Store if it hadn't been because they had to. Why would they? Without piracy they could have kept on demanding people to pay ridiculous prizes for stuff they didn't really want. And pay TWICE for one CD-version and one MP3-version for their MP3-player. Don't kid yourself and think that they wouldn't have done that. I'm too drunk to find the quote, but a Sony representative once said it was theft to transfer their CD collection to their MP3-player! It's theft to transfer the songs you've bought from one media to another! If that isn't wrong, then I don't know what is.

 

In a way I'm glad that torrent sites exist. In another way I realize that they're destructive in the long run. I just wish democracy had a way of expressing itself without stealing the work of others, in a legitimate way. Torrents is the closest we've gotten so far, which is sad.

[alanschu]

I suspect they are getting a fine in lieu of jail time.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30265030/

STOCKHOLM - Four men behind The Pirate Bay, one of the world's biggest free file-sharing Web sites, were each sentenced to a year in jail on Friday for breaching copyright, and ordered to pay $3.6 million in compensation.

I hope its $3.6 million each.

 

Every single movie and music cd/dvd I own is store bought. We need more prison time for them. One year is not enough.

 

Here is the best way to see this: PirateBay is providing the escape car while someone robs a bank or store. They are literally saying, "I will drive the car anywhere in the world. All you have to do is ask, and we will drive you to the door. Don't tell me what your doing, but I have no problem sitting in the driver's seat to transport you." If you think about their car as being a massive vessel (world wide), you can only guess at how many theives they are transporting. They are a accessory to several crimes. We are not talking about a small franchise that does smaller crimes.

 

 

To clarify I didn't mean that they were getting a fine instead of jail time. The person was comparing the fine to the fine that rapists and murderers get (in Canada they don't get fined, they get incarcerated).

[alanschu]

Oh dear, maybe i was not clear enough, you are all applying what you think should be done according to your standards.

 

According to the swedish verdict of their standards, they are worse scum than those that i mentioned before, thus making this decision look like it was done after political pressure.

 

Of course they are guilty of what they are accused of, and i don't know how exactly they could prove the sums of damages either (i.e. can one correllate the amount of downloads to the potential causation of loss of sales directly? For example would've each downloader have bought the media instead, i sure don't know the measures on how to prove that one true), but i can smell that something is very fishy about this.

 

 

Again, while I don't know the swedish system, I am guessing that their murderers and rapists are incarcerated, rather than given fines.

 

Am I incorrect in this assumption?

 

 

In Canada a murderer pays a $0 fine, but gets a life sentence with parole after 25 years.

[Enoch]

Of course they are guilty of what they are accused of, and i don't know how exactly they could prove the sums of damages either (i.e. can one correllate the amount of downloads to the potential causation of loss of sales directly? For example would've each downloader have bought the media instead, i sure don't know the measures on how to prove that one true), but i can smell that something is very fishy about this.

This was a criminal prosecution, not a civil suit for damages. And, in any case, there's a quite easy shortcut to value the damages they caused-- all of the site's revenues (or at least all of the site's revenues divided by the portion of the traffic that was drawn there by the promise free copyrighted downloads). The whole point of copyright is to make sure that the owner of a work is entitled to its economic proceeds. If the law doesn't stop others from realizing a portion of those proceeds (sans permission from the owner, of course), it becomes completely ineffective. The high fines in this type of case are necessary, otherwise potential criminals get the message that they can become millionaires at the cost of doing a year's time in prison.

[Maria Caliban]

In Canada a murderer pays a $0 fine, but gets a life sentence with parole after 25 years.

 

In the USA, there's criminal and civil courts. For instence, OJ Simpson was found not-guilty a criminal trial in the death of his wife and her friend, but was found guilty in the civil trial and ordered to pay $12.5 million to his children for the wrongful death of his wife.

[alanschu]

Well that is bizarro.

[Humodour]

The Pirate Party is Sweden's third largest political party and, after the number of members they've gained because of this, will hold an even larger balance of power in Sweden next election.

 

I wouldn't be crowing too soon if I were the MPAA.

 

The government can keep the **** off my internet.

[Maria Caliban]

The Pirate Party is Sweden's third largest political party and, after the number of members they've gained because of this, will hold an even larger balance of power in Sweden next election.

 

I thought you were making a joke, but wiki says I was wrong; there is a Pirate Party. However, it's not the third largest, but the third largest outside of parliment.

 

Personally, I'm far more worried about Google Books than the Pirate Bay.