The damages alone are an insult. Yeah, let's not look at actual damages, let's just use Hollywood fictional bookkeeping.
Today also happens to be the day I've lost access to the Pirate Bay through my ISP because a corrupt judge decided Hollywood profits trump my civil liberties.
It is so very depressing to see how Hollywood has completely corrupted our legal and political systems to the point were civil liberties are being gutted. This can no longer be tolerated.
Remember: the charges and extradition demands against Julian Assange are coming from the Swedish court system as well.
This is the accumulation of decades of US interference in Sweden's sovereignty, resulting in laws and institutions that are in no way serving the Swedish people, nor any particular political ideology. And it is the same all over Europe. Our laws are not our laws. They've been bought and paid for (although not necessarily in cash).
Even if the trial itself was squeaky clean (it most definitely wasn't), and the verdict was a fair interpretation of the current law (highly debatable, but IANAL), the fact remains that these Swedish citizens are convicted for something that would never have been a crime in the first place had the US government and the US entertainment industry not thoroughly corrupted Sweden's legislative process.
Whether you call it corruption or regular diplomatic process is up to you.
On the one hand, there is movie-villain corruption. I pay bribes directly to politicians and law enforcement personnel, then I give them orders, which they follow regardless of the law.
On the other hand, there is a much more common type of corruption through affinity. I run a very lucrative and well-thought-of business in a key industry. I pay lobbyists to obtain access to politicians. Politicians develop an affinity for my interests because they have more exposure to my point of view through lobbying and that is magnified by the positive public perception of my company. Then, when my interests and other people's interests collide politicians (and law enforcement as well, due to similar phenomena) will naturally take my side because they have come to associate my interests with their and society's interests. This extends up to bending the law.
And, of course, there are degrees in between. I not only have fostered an affinity between politicians and my business, I give campaign donations, my lobbyists take you to really fancy meals, I gave a lucrative job to your brother in law, etc.
TPB has hosted torrent files, they were not hosting content, so what they did was perfectly legal.
The verdict of this case, which ignores the facts, shows clear signs of US pressure on the Swedish legal system and politicians there. There is no other explanation.
Hollywood's agenda (censorship, invasive control, panopticon style policing) just happens to coincide with the natural tendency of every government that has ever existed. The framers of our constitution clearly recognized the profoundly human basis for these tendencies, which is why the law specifically designed to constrain them remains valuable (if tattered) more than two centuries after it was written. Indeed, this nasty but relatively stable aspect of human nature is also why we can relate to even older plays written by Shakespeare. He also had an extroridinarly good sense of what makes people, as political animals, tick.
While I agree that corruption is a massive problem, and that Hollywood is a particular nefarious player of that game, I think this issue in particular has a much more sinister undercurrent. In truth, there's a good chance that the government would be inclined to side with maximalist views of IP rights even without the legalized bribery, since they're so convenient to anyone looking for a broader and more pervasive set of police powers, and needing a relatively innocuous excuse for rolling them out.
Say that you're riding in the car with a friend when he suddenly pulls over. He looks at you and says, "I'm going to rob that bank over there." If you do nothing to stop him you become an accessory to that crime—and can be convicted by the judge for it.
What is claimed in the discussion here is that TPB is an accessory. They had knowledge but did nothing about it, and cannot be held accountable for their users, right? Arguably, since TPB created a site to share torrents on and had no piracy policy (but taunted everyone that complained) they become accomplices! They help the end-pirate find where to get his contraband.
We aren't talking about MegaUpload. At least with MegaUpload they can argue that there is no description of the file, and no way for them to inspect the data. No, we're talking about a site where it FLAT OUT SAYS that "this torrent has the cracked version of ..." or of a movie that hasn't been released yet.
Did you ever see a warning banner for piracy? Or a "warning, you must be 18+ to pirate these files?" So TPB can't be an accessory, and they can't be uninvolved. Just like you'd be held accountable if you handed a bully a baseball bat.
Oh, yeah, but that's US law. And US pressure on a foreign power. I agree with the anti-RIAA and anti-MPAA and anti-Hollywood sentiments expressed ... but when it comes down to a foreign country harboring pirates and saying, "Sorry, we can't do anything about it: it's legal here." Do you think that ANY world power would just drop it? Of course the US pressured Sweden to prosecute a group harming its economy/trade interests.
I can't believe how many here are defending TPB.
Countries have pressured other sovereign powers before, and the US is just following in the global-political norm. The fact that pressuring a foreign power is done should not upset you as much as the fact that the Swedish government caved to it.
Expecting the US government/embassy not to pressure a foreign power over something that it perceives as being illegal, and if not illegal then something exceedingly close, is illogical. Politics is looking out for one's own interest. And it is in the interest of the US government to push prosecution of foreign pirates, whether they are digital or Somali, so that a "US industry" can thrive.
I personally hate Hollywood and watch less than 10 movies a year (most of them are older and gotten from the library). However, I can't disagree with my government in that the founders of TPB got what they justly deserved.
Globalization of corporations and corporate interest profits the corporations, not the citizens. Not ever.
Back on topic: The US is already entrenched in foreign intervention through anti-terrorism, anti-genocide, anti-torture, maintaining cheap and sustainable oil prices (and other imported and exported goods), anti-drug-running, and even "spreading/encouraging democracy/freedom".
I admit that enforcing intellectual property doesn't appear too far off from these, but I think there is a crucial difference: these existing interferences benefit most people in America (spreading democracy and fighting druglords is debatable) while the intellectual property interferences benefit a single, dying, hated industry (and that benefit is also very debatable).
Most people are upset because the gains (to "Big Media") do not seem worth the cost of foreign entanglements and limitation of free speech (domestic and abroad).
You are exactly correct about the US's activity in foreign interventions. I would say that "we" are very active in that regard. And frankly, I think that we ought to get out of other people's sovereignty and be content with our own. Hence why I support Ron Paul as a candidate.
However, I disagree strongly on one point:
> Most people are upset because the gains (to "Big Media") do not seem worth the cost of foreign entanglements and limitation of free speech (domestic and abroad).
The takedown of TPB is not about freedom of speech. They could say whatever they want (and did) without getting taken down. But as soon as they assisted US citizens to commit crimes as defined by the US, the TPB became a target. Any country that has a foreign power aiding its citizens to commit what it perceives as a crime will either: pressure the other country to put a stop to it, or will take internal measures.
As I tried to lay out in my previous post, TPB is in the position of an accomplice, according to US law, and will be targeted by the means the US has at hand. Pressuring a power via the ambassador is rather above-board, compared with the "removal" of Osama bin Laden.
I find the definition of "intellectual property" to be too broadly defined and protected. But piracy is just theft, pure and simple...
Google "black sites". Apparently transporting people to bases in other countries in order to detain and or torture them is ok for the US side... Trying to extradite people who have never been to the US is considered fine too.
I don't care about what industry was affected here - US should have no such control over other countries and no such influence on their legal system.
The interesting detail is that downloading a torrent isn't illegal in some jurisdictions. Charging someone for aiding to a legal behaviour is a stretch that doesn't belong to criminal law.
Except that Hollywood is making more money than ever.
This is about cultural hegemony and economic gatekeepers. Please don't be deluded into thinking it's about law.
This means the young adult won't ever go to work because nearly everything he would ever make would be deducted to pay off the fines he can never finish up. Thus he will simply not pay the fine, become unemployed, and make the country pay him social security to live. Any work he will actually do will be gray, i.e. unofficial untaxed "pirate" income that doesn't formally exist. Way to go.
The TPB guys probably have more ambitious plans as the liberation front of bit-sharing. I bet this might just tip an even larger percentage of Swedish people to support TPB and the Pirate Party. Isn't the only thing that is, in the crowds of conservative government or business, more dangerous than a liberty fighter an imprisoned liberty fighter?
Oh please. A bunch of guys who want to download music and videos for free aren't 'liberty fighters'. You can disagree with copyright, or current implementations of copyright, or whatever, but calling activists of marginal issues like this 'liberty fighters' is devaluating the concept of a true 'liberty fighter', much like 'terrorism' has been devaluated to mean pretty much everything that pisses somebody else off.
https://www.flashback.org/t402278
For those of you who don't read Swedish, it's a thread about how anakata, one of the founders, talks about going AWOL from the Swedish bureaucratic system.
Utan känt hemvist == no known place of residence.
That's debatable. Not that I'd want them to run, but getting caught is in no way a certain thing.
It seems romantic in spy books, but I doubt the reality is very satisfying way to live your life.
[1] "70% of early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications" - http://www.anu.edu.au/fellows/jbraithwaite/_documents/Articl...
[2] "half of all the loans called sub-prime, were also liars loans. Liars loans means that there was no prudent underwriting of the loan" - http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/09/william-black...
[3] "how many criminal referrals did the same agency do, in this crisis. Remember it did well over 10,000 in the prior crisis. Well the answer is zero. They completely shut down making criminal referrals" - ibid
[4] "In 2003, Freddie Mac coughed up $125 million after it was caught misreporting its earnings by $5 billion; nobody went to jail. In 2006, Fannie Mae was fined $400 million, but executives who had overseen phony accounting techniques to jack up their bonuses faced no criminal charges. That same year, AIG paid $1.6 billion after it was caught in a major accounting scandal that would indirectly lead to its collapse two years later, but no executives at the insurance giant were prosecuted." - http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-stre...
[1] http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09STOCKHOLM141.html#par12
Having said that, it's still over the top for posting links.
Israelis enjoying life in Swedish prison
Three Israelis jailed in Scandinavian country turn down offer to continue serving their sentence in homeland, explain 'here we are treated with steaks, sex and private television airing World Cup games for free'
This sort of speculation is meaningless.
I don't like the MPAA, RIAA and others either, but sites like the TPB are not helping matters.
You're missing the point that TPB is a global thing. Sure, what they're doing is illegal in America, and an American would be in big trouble and the site would have been shut down long ago. That's great. Good for America.
TPB represents the rest of the world standing up and saying "You know what America, stop coming over to our countries and telling us what to do. We're sick of it."
Before TPB, every foreign site would give up and co-operate at the tiniest threat from the American legal system and law enforcement. For years TPB was the only site/group with the guts to stand up and say "no thanks" when threatened.
For those of us outside America, that really means something.
I honestly think sites like wikileaks, etc. would not exist without the guts and determination shown by TPB
Anyway, it's really sad this verdict was given. Linking should not be a crime under any circumstance. And if the current judges think it is, then the laws must be changed to reject that assumption immediately.
