p2pnet.net news:- Hollywood’s MPAA regularly and routinely uses agencies around the world, funded by local taxpayers, in its ceaseless, but in vain, efforts to stop counterfeiters from running rings around its owners, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney.

Last summer The Pirate Bay was briefly offline when Swedish minister of justice Thomas Bodström, “gave in to American orders,” as a post on Pirate Watch stated.

This refers to a raid in Stockholm when lose to 200 TPB servers were grabbed. The clip on the right from YouTube video of the occasion (note the handcuffs) shows a Swedish guardian of the law hard at work. The cop on the left enjoys a chuckle during the same raid.

We’ve also stashed an .flv here, just in case. If you don’t have a player, go here.

Sweden’s Justice Ombudsmen (JO) has been looking into things and has, “just released their investigation regarding the razzia towards us,” says The Pirate Bay blog, going on:

“We have just read it and we’re not completely satisfied. We will return with another blogpost as soon as we have gone through it an extra time just to make sure.”

Says Andreas G on NordicHardware:

During the raid the police didn’t just confiscate Pirate Bay’s servers but also a load of other unrelated servers; a total of 186 servers were confiscated from PRQ’s server rooms. This led to that a big number of companies and a lot of small and large websites lost their servers and in many cases their primary livelihood. Both the police and the prosecutor were charged for official misconduct, but none of the charges led to an investigation. The judge came to the conclusion that during the circumstances it was justified to confiscate all of the servers.

Ombudsmen of Justice (JO) has since then been investigating if there have been any irregularities. There were quite a lot of rumors going around that MPA, IFPI and other lobby organizations, but also the American embassy, was trying to steer ministers and other high officials to pressure the police and prosecutors to act against The Pirate Bay.

The report that have been published clearly states that IFPI, MPA and the American embassy had contacted the current Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström and the Secretary of State Dan Eliasson in an attempt to make them force the police into action. Although, JO has come to the conclusion that none of the two have done anything to wrong nor have they tried to influence the police or prosecutor. Eliasson wrote the following in his reply to the American authorities;

“(a)ccording to the Swedish constitution, it is not possible for the Government or the Ministry to intervene in a specific case. I can however assure you that I follow closely the actions taken by the police and the prosecutors in respect of copyrights infringements on the Internet and I will not, if necessary, hesitate to initiate further measures to improve their effectiveness”

JO also says that the police could’ve acted a lot faster when it comes to the confiscated servers. It took them over a week before they decided to give back some of the servers that was not related to Pirate Bay (from May 31 to 2-8 June). JO adds though that the decision to remove the servers was correct as it, according to the police, would take a lot longer to investigate them in place than at the station.

JO did not buy the explanation that they had to remove the servers because otherwise someone could’ve come in from the outside and delete material. JO thought that they could just as well have unplugged the TP cable, but the time argument was enough to not charge anyone for misconduct.

Stay tuned.

Slashdot it!

Also See:
American orders – Swedish ‘The Pirate Bay’ demo, June 5, 2006
Pirate Watch – Pictures from the piracy demonstration, June 3, 2006
same raid – The Pirate Bay back online, June 3, 2006
blog – Non-serious and some serious, April 2, 2007
NordicHardware – JO’s investigation of the Pirate Bay raid is done, April 2, 2007

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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