Sweden poised to sue The Pirate Bay
p2pnet news | Music:- Emboldened, no doubt, by the Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG OiNK farce, and the Hollywood initiated debacle centering on Britain’s www.tv-links.co.uk, in Sweden, state prosecutor Håkan Roswall says he’s ready to charge five members of The Pirate Bay, and that he’ll get rolling before the end of January next year.
They’re being accused of the usual ‘facilitating copyright infringement’.
Roswall started making threats in the Spring following a much-publicized raid on the file-sharing site’s servers the year before (right).
Then, police and prosecutors confiscated the servers along with other computer equipment, also closing down a number of sites that had nothing to do with music or film sharing, said
The Pirate Bay’s servers were kept at the PRQ hosting company in Stockholm, but when police raided the company they allegedly took all the servers on the premises without checking who they belonged to, said the story.
For its part, TPB is repeating much the same defense as the one mooted by OiNK’s Alan Ellis that he was running the service which to all intents and purposes was the same as Google’s, ie, he was operating a search engine only and didn’t serve up actual copyrighted material.
Moreover, “information that leaked earlier this year showed that the Swedish police couldn’t find any usable evidence on the servers they confiscated during the raid last year,” says Torrentfreak, going on:
“One of the biggest surprises is that the prosecutor plans to press charges against the well-known Swedish neo-fascist Carl Lundstrom, who is only remotely related to The Pirate Bay. Tobias Andersson, one of the Pirate Bay admins, admitted that Lundstrom’s hosting company Rix Telecom offered them cheap bandwidth in the past. However, this was only because one of the Pirate Bay founders used to work for Rix Telecom, nothing more, nothing less.
“It is not unlikely that Roswall decided to include Lundstrom in the list of suspects to manipulate public opinion. Lundström did confirm to IDG.se that he is under investigation, but refuses to be interrogated by the police.
“At this point we only know that Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) and Carl Lundstrom are identified as suspects, but the complete list will be published here as soon as it is known.
Whatever the outcome, “the Pirate Bay have already announced that they’re here to stay,” says the story, adding:
“They told us that they will simply move to another country if they are outlawed in Sweden, without downtime!”
Click here for the YouTube cam video from the original TPB bust. The the clips on the right were taken from it.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
OiNK farce – Do an OiNK, says Quebec’s ADISQ, November 1, 2007
Hollywood initiated debacle – UK’s www.tv-links.co.uk busted, October 20, 2007
confiscated the servers – The Pirate Bay back online, , June 3, 2007
The Local – Pirate Bay raid hits other sites, June 1, 2007
Torrentfreak – Prosecutor Announces Charges Against The Pirate Bay, November 6, 2007
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November 10th, 2007 at 8:58 am
May they live for ever!!!! Three Cheers for the Pirate BaY!!!
November 12th, 2007 at 12:41 am
The Pirate Bay is more important than you may imagine. Their existence is an important landmark in the status of freedom worldwide. TPB effectively does the same thing any Internet forum, blog service (Blogger, LiveJournal), file sharing service (RapidShare, SendSpace, eMule, LimeWire), and social networking site does: they provide an OPEN COMMUNITY WHERE INFORMATION CAN BE EXCHANGED. Their “facilitation” of copyright infringement is no more significant than someone on a Blogger blog posting links to places where direct-download illegal copies of some kind of software or media can be acquired, or a search engine such as AltaVista providing a “MP3/Audio search” that can be used to pull up indexed MP3s that in some cases are full-quality and full-length versions of the song(s) being searched for.
The argument that TPB is basing their refusal to go along with copyright takedown demands on is simple: their servers host torrents, which are a combination of file hashes, file names, comments, and on the back end, lists of machines that may potentially be willing to send parts of the file to the torrent user.
No “illegal” data is hosted on their servers.
No “illegal” data passes through their servers.
The real-life worst-case scenario equivalent would be a person that tells other people all about various hard drugs and where they can get them. While the person may be telling others HOW to do something that is questionable, that person is only handing out information and can’t be held responsible in any way for the actions actually taken by the people he informed.
In our twisted “justice systems” today, they’re trying to make people responsible for others’ actions. The RIAA and governments are doing the same thing here. You know the recent trend in lumping copyrights and patents together under the misnomer “intellectual property” to coerce courts into assigning real, tangible property rights to intangible government-granted restrictions (so-called “copy rights,” note the space for emphasis on the deeper meaning of the term) that are fundamentally different from tangible property and do not work the same way? It’s the same scheme everywhere: the owner of a car could be charged with “enabling” a crime for letting the criminal borrow his car, even if he didn’t know it would be used in that way, because (as it was said in the movie “Training Day”) “It’s not what you know. It’s what you can prove.”
If TPB’s owners are successfully charged and convicted of “facilitating copyright infringement” then, at least in Sweden, freedom has quietly gone straight to Hell in a handbasket: do not pass go, do not collect $200…in fact, you owe us $20,000 per shared file, so rot in your (both financially and morally) bankrupt Hell on Earth.
Fight the good fight, no matter how powerless you may perceive yourself as being. While one voice is small, one hundred small voices becomes a roar that the government won’t be able to ignore so easily, and now is the time to open your mouth and say what needs to be said: if TPB goes down, you’ll go down as well.
“I disagree with what you have to say but will fight to the death to protect your right to say it.” –Misattributed to Voltaire every time, but who cares who said it?
November 12th, 2007 at 11:25 am
“The real-life worst-case scenario equivalent would be a person that tells other people all about various hard drugs and where they can get them. While the person may be telling others HOW to do something that is questionable, that person is only handing out information and can’t be held responsible in any way for the actions actually taken by the people he informed.”
Wrong, at least in the U.S. I don’t recall the name, but there was a case where some young guy from California had a phone conversation with an undercover cop. The cop was trying to set up a drug deal in order to bust this guy. The guy told the agent he didn’t have any coke, but to try calling someone else he knew and gave him a phone no. They arrested the guy on some bs charge like “facilitating a drug deal” and he is doing hard time in prison.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
“They arrested the guy on some bs charge like “facilitating a drug deal” and he is doing hard time in prison.”
He was held responsible for simply handing out information. It’s a victimless crime. I don’t doubt it happened here in the USA, because I know it happens all the damned time, but that doesn’t mean it *should.*
No person should EVER be held responsible for the actions of another. Free will can be a bitch, but had the cop been someone really looking for drugs, it wouldn’t have been the fault of that guy if the drug seeker actually used his advice to locate a dealer.
Crimes that do not have a non-consenting or child victim shouldn’t be crimes, excluding certain specific circumstances. The entire text of the book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do” is available online at the late author’s website, http://www.mcwilliams.com/ and covers the topic of victimless crimes from many angles that are rarely thought about during the emotional crusades to punish anyone who is even remotely connected to what is perceived by the unwashed masses as “doing evil,” regardless of how freedom and even basic human rights are ripped apart in the process.