"The Pirate's Bay" Owners Get Jail Time

[kamspy]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8003799.stm

A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.

Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as "bizarre".

"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. And that's a bit weird," Sunde said.

"It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

"We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."

For those who don't know, The Pirate's Bay doesn't host anything on their servers. It's a search engine.

Should Google face the same fate? I doubt they will, but you can still use Google to gain illegal access copyrighted material.

YouTube hosts copyrighted material illegally. Unless they are formally asked to pull a video.

Pirates Bay also took down torrent links if they were approached by someone holding a copyright, and they didn't even host any actual content.

This is crap. Nothing spells deterrence like martyrs and show-trials I guess.

What is ridiculous is how absolutely horrible the prosecution was in this case. They didn't even have a clue how torrents work, they brought in their "experts" who didn't even know how torrents work, and were trying to prove that the Pirate Bay was holding the actual files on their own servers and sharing them, which is totally not the case with torrents.


Every day in trial, the prosecution fumbled the ball, and had egg on their face. Then the verdict comes out and they win. This is ridiculous and stinks of some type of shady trial here. When you have HUGE record companies and movie companies involved, you wonder who was REALLY pulling the strings in this trial.



This stinks of some type of conspiracy or something. The Pirate Bay Team won the trial, but lost the trial. Makes no sense.

[DonnyDC]

In the grand scheme of things I think they needed to be shutdown, piracy will always exist but the problem is that Piratebay made it too easy. Soccer mom sally could be pirating finding nemo.

About the hosting thing.. if piratebay gets shut down I wonder what kind of trouble companies like megashare, rapidshare, megaupload etc. are gonna get into. Those sites allow pirated content to be downloaded with unlimited speeds(takes me about 10 minutes for sd movies, less than an hour for HD movies)

[kamspy]

It's the way the case played out that bothered me.

The Pirate's Bay isn't the only site of it's kind, it's not even the biggest. The "Pirate" name made them a better target for a 'show trial' and they didn't break any laws.

Google up "**movie/song** + torrent" and you get the same info Pirate's Bay gives.

Google isn't getting thrown in jail.

[tipstir]

+ YouTube Video

Just checked them out, they seem to host torrent files. They give detailed instructions on how to use them on their site. That's not like Google at all.

Torrent files are what makes torrent downloads possible. No, they don't host copyrighted material. They help providing access to it.

[kamspy]

Originally Posted by Nikopol

Just checked them out, they seem to host torrent files. They give detailed instructions on how to use them on their site. That's not like Google at all.

Torrent files are what makes torrent downloads possible. No, they don't host copyrighted material. They help providing access to it.

Not all torrent files are illegal.

What's the fastest way to share a 5GB multimedia file with someone half the world away? People use torrents for legal PC game patches because the publisher servers are slower. Look up how many World of Warcraft update files are on torrent sites (legal WoW updates released from Blizzard and allowed to be shared in any manor).

It's the precedent that worries me. With bandwidth caps spreading, P2P is a viable way to cut costs when operating a legal web server.


The most troubling thing, is if you read more info on the case, it's obvious that the defense won the trial. Painfully obvious. The prosecution tried fruitlessly to prove they were hosting the content, and fail to prove that. That's the only case the prosecution even brought up.

Yet, TPB lost the case. It wasn't a lawful hearing IMO. They weren't convicted by anything brought up by the prosecution. Are they guilty? IMO, yes, but that still doesn't make up for the fact that they were prosecuted on hearsay and not facts.


For example: If a law school student read everything in the transcript and was asked which side won the case, I'd wager 99% would say the defense (based soley upon what was actually brought up in the trial).


Also, why target TPB? There are hundreds of identical sites that do identical things (give torrent trackers), and they aren't being taken to court. But the name of their website doesn't make for the same "show trial" the Pirate's Bay does.


Just not good judicial precedent.

[Pinoy]

Originally Posted by Nikopol

Just checked them out, they seem to host torrent files. They give detailed instructions on how to use them on their site. That's not like Google at all.

Torrent files are what makes torrent downloads possible. No, they don't host copyrighted material. They help providing access to it.

Yes they host torrent files, and many torrents are completely legal: Linux distros, indie music and opensource programs for example. And yes you can find detailed instructions using google for just about anything... hell I use google to find unsecured web cams to see what I can see

I'm not gonna say the PB guys are innocent though...

Not all torrent files are illegal.

Of course not. But probably 99.999% of movies are copyrighted in a way, that wouldn't allow this kind of use. As is music. There are no measures on that site effectively preventing access or hosting of the obviously illegal torrents. Which are probably the vast majoritiy of torrents on all of these sites

We can debate this endlessly, though there is no need for that. Imo pirates should simply accept that what they are doing is breach of copyright (not stealing btw) and accept that this can have consequences. Those helping them should do the same.

PS:
I'm seeding legal torrents, as i type this.

[kamspy]

I share auto-cad/zBrush renders and ProLogix files with P2P all the time for work.

They won't fit in an email attachment. There's really no other way to do it.

I'm not debating piracy ethics in this thread as much as I am the bad judicial precedent set in this hearing because the defendants were found guilty on charges that the prosecution didn't even bring to the case.

[tipstir]

Originally Posted by kamspy

I share auto-cad/zBrush renders and ProLogix files with P2P all the time for work.

They won't fit in an email attachment. There's really no other way to do it.

I'm not debating piracy ethics in this thread as much as I am the bad judicial precedent set in this hearing because the defendants were found guilty on charges that the prosecution didn't even bring to the case.

How large are you files.. I can suggest some sites that are not unsafe to use. I program and save my work on those sites. I don't use P2P for my work.

[tipstir]

Originally Posted by Nikopol

Of course not. But probably 99.999% of movies are copyrighted in a way, that wouldn't allow this kind of use. As is music. There are no measures on that site effectively preventing access or hosting of the obviously illegal torrents. Which are probably the vast majoritiy of torrents on all of these sites

We can debate this endlessly, though there is no need for that. Imo pirates should simply accept that what they are doing is breach of copyright (not stealing btw) and accept that this can have consequences. Those helping them should do the same.

PS:
I'm seeding legal torrents, as i type this.

These are just people like you and me, but the only difference is they like to share.. Then wee folk take so called leechers.. It's like skies the limit. The way things are even upper middle class are doing it. Strange to here that...

Music, Videos, E-books, Software, you name can be had.. Of course nothing is for free without the risks like Rootkits, hidden spybots, beyond the common worm, trojan, virus, malware, then you got bad ips an all sorts of crap.. It it worth the hassle..

I be damm if I know!

I'm not debating piracy ethics in this thread as much as I am the bad judicial precedent set in this hearing because the defendants were found guilty on charges that the prosecution didn't even bring to the case.

Hmm, this happens all the time before courts. E.g. personally i see that with judges/courts being unable to correctly read financial statements.

I wonder why the defending side failed at explaining, how the details of torrents actually work. It's not that hard to do.

The actual "making an illegal copy" happens between the connected clients, with 'uploading' being the real problem in most countries. The clients (programs) are only tools, that can be used legally and illegally, therefore problematic to qualify in a legal way. (Didn't stop France from banning them completely, they can't even develop them in the open there any more. Had to give up my preferred ABC_OKC client because of that... )

The torrent files provide the info and the tracker technically connects the clients. This is what TPB did (like all other similar sites like it), though i don't know in what way the trackers are connected to TPB. And since the trackers can be both used for legal and illegal activities, they are also problematic to qualitfy.

Imo the court therefore would have to examine the legal nature of hosting torrent files (which only contain technical information), uploaded to their servers by third parties, that allow a copyright violation to happen.

From a legal standpoint (though only imo): In the environment of torrent filesharing, is the copyright violation thinkable/possible without the torrent file? Imo: No, it wouldn't be possible. You need the torrent file, without the information it provides, you can't connect to other clients. Therefore imo there exists a causal connection between the copyright violation and hosting (providing) the torrent file.

I doubt the court would come to a fundamentally different conclusion, even if they understood the principles correctly. Which is being claimed didn't happen.

[tipstir]

Nothing is uploaded you host the stuff on your system.. The sites have the torrent tracker info so if your down and turn off your system then the leechers can't get to the files. The system seems to be working and sites go down and sites go back-up. Supernova was the largest then came TorrentSpy but that was block by the US- so no US IP address could access it. Still everyone wants stuff for free I know this type of crap has put a lot of us who develop shareware games out of business. I ran my online software business from 1991 to 2001 and produced 67 games and 20 windows utilities. If one customer I had wanted to say hey let me put-up tipstir's game pack on torrent then everyone would grab it and I would loose in funds.

Originally Posted by tipstir

These are just people like you and me, but the only difference is they like to share.. Then wee folk take so called leechers.. It's like skies the limit. The way things are even upper middle class are doing it. Strange to here that...

Music, Videos, E-books, Software, you name can be had.. Of course nothing is for free without the risks like Rootkits, hidden spybots, beyond the common worm, trojan, virus, malware, then you got bad ips an all sorts of crap.. It it worth the hassle..

I be damm if I know!

They like to "share", they like to get stuff for free, they like to break copyright.

Some people like to speed with their cars. They accept getting a ticket, if they get caught, though they will whine about it. They accept risking their drivers licence temporarily or permanently, if they do it excessively. They accept going to jail in extreme cases.

Originally Posted by tipstir

Nothing is uploaded you host the stuff on your system.. The sites have the torrent tracker info so if your down and turn off your system then the leechers can't get to the files. The system seems to be working and sites go down and sites go back-up. Supernova was the largest then came TorrentSpy but that was block by the US- so no US IP address could access it. Still everyone wants stuff for free I know this type of crap has put a lot of us who develop shareware games out of business. I ran my software business from 1991 to 2001 and produced 67 games. If one customer I had wanted to say hey let me put-up tipstir's game pack on torrent then everyone would grab it and I would loose in funds.

I think that is what i said. The actual copyright violation happens between the two peers, with the uploading part from your own pc to another peer(s) being the more problematic thing in a legal sense (You act like a server offering the illegal download.)

Imo the legal question to examine regarding TPB is, how to qualify 'helping' the peers with their copyright violations.