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.

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.

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?