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Court affirms jail time for Pirate Bay founders

74 points| forza | 15 years ago |thelocal.se | reply

151 comments

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[+] kevingadd|15 years ago|reply
“In two years, this type of piracy will be over. After a ruling like this and all the pioneers start to get older and have children and families, piracy won’t occur to this extent.”

The only way I can see this type of piracy being over in two years is if the media industries up and die so there's nothing left to steal.

I wonder how much this case actually cost the media industries to litigate. The actual fines involved are relatively small, so it would be interesting to know whether the record companies will be able to use the fines to cover their legal fees.

[+] sophacles|15 years ago|reply
Copyright infringement is not stealing.

Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource, e.g. taking money or property, using your time without paying an agreed price.

Copyright infringement happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules. You aren't denied any resource you had before my infringement.

Please stop calling copyright infringement stealing. It is not. Doing so is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of guilt in people (due to western notions of Stealing is Wrong).

[+] ique|15 years ago|reply
I just had a small vision when I read this article.

In two years time Voddler (or something like it) will be big for movies, Spotify will be big for music and people will stop purchasing things entirely.

The "Pirate movement" will see this as progress and smart people going around the old geezers in charge, because we don't have to pay outrageous amounts of money for a piece of plastic we don't even want.

The media industry will call it a success in their anti-piracy harshness and will cite cases like this as the reason for the new ways to crop up.

Both parties will think they're right, and in the end the only thing that has changed is the distribution-system.

The 2 year timescale is probably off, but i'm pretty sure everything will end with those idiots saying "It's a good thing we put kids in jail because otherwise we wouldn't live in the wonderful world we do today."

[+] praptak|15 years ago|reply
As far as I remember these guys declared never to pay the fines. So no, the fines themselves will not cover anything.
[+] nhangen|15 years ago|reply
30 million kronor is around 4.2 mil USD. I'm guessing that's not going to happen.

I lost track of the story shortly after they were found guilty. Did they get scooped up by the police or are they in refuge somewhere?

I applaud these gents for standing so tall against their attackers, even against the threat of a judgment like this.

It's just a shame that the music industry is still wasting time on issues like these. Thank god I wasn't arrested for sharing cassette tapes in my early teens.

[+] FrankenTan|15 years ago|reply
In Sweden, I think the punishment isn't actually enforced until final verdict has been given.

There's still one more instance (and possibly EU court after that one) to appeal through.

[+] ohashi|15 years ago|reply
I met Sunde after that original ruling so I have to assume they aren't locked up and won't be until they stop appealing.
[+] swombat|15 years ago|reply
And the RIAA lands another awesome strike of the sword into the ocean.

The more they fight piracy in this way, the further they push file trading into completely untrackable recesses of the internet.

It's actually a good thing in the long run, I suppose. Between this and the Homeland DNS grab, soon we'll have an alternative internet where everything is encrypted, routed through ZKS systems, untrackable, and completely outside of government control.

[+] zzzeek|15 years ago|reply
as long as its limited to the edges of the technical community and not 80% of high school kids, they're more or less "fine" with that
[+] radu_floricica|15 years ago|reply
It's easy to build alternatives to file sharing. You can be as inventive as you want. DNS on the other hand is a standard. No matter how many alternatives you cook up to it, you have to replace to many things in too many places for them to work.

Either that, or simply install something at the client's place that bypasses the whole system. Works, but somehow I doubt DNS is so easy to replicate.

[+] cskau|15 years ago|reply
As a citizen of neighbouring Denmark, I find this a truly grim day. How can something like copyright infringement result in a prison term ?

And don't even get me started with the whole "A torrent tracker is copyright infringement" argument. Jeez!

[+] forza|15 years ago|reply
Good question. The verdict actually states that you normally shouldn't be sentenced to prison for this type of crime. Instead the court motivates the prison sentences with upholding "law-abidingness" as file-sharing has become "a problem for society". Which is a bit scary if you ask me.

If you read Swedish, this conclusion is on the top of page 47 in the verdict @ http://fildelning.se/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TPB.pdf

[+] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
It may not be copyright infringement, but it is "aiding and abetting".
[+] tzs|15 years ago|reply
> As a citizen of neighbouring Denmark, I find this a truly grim day. How can something like copyright infringement result in a prison term ?

I'd guess it is similar to the US: if you aren't doing it commercially, you can't get prison--it is purely a civil matter. If you are doing it commercially, then it can be a crime punishable by prison.

TPB was/is commercial, making millions a year monetizing copyright infringement via advertising.

[+] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
Murdering bits (deleting them) will get you nothing, but copying bits (creating more of them) will get you a jail sentence. And in this case it's allowing access to bits that allow other people to copy bits,

It's a bizarre world, and I think stuff like this is a direct consequence of subscribing to legal fictions.

[+] spiffworks|15 years ago|reply
Between rulings like this and the pressure that these companies are exerting on small websites, it would be impossible for a Youtube to emerge today. What's more, this has a sort of chilling effect, with more and more companies shying away from potentially dangerous ideas and moving to safe, consumer internet applications like a million twitter clients that bore you to death. I fear for the future of the internet as I know it.