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.
I don't know Swedish law, but they were convinced of aiding copyright infringement. To me, it is clear they are guilty of that, the whole site is designed for that sole reason of copyright infringement (except perhaps 1% of torrents). Further, the admin do extensive "cleaning" of torrents they deem inapproriate (for example files put in the wrong section), but never clean up copyright infringing files.
Now, you might think that aiding copyright infringement shouldn't be illegal, but if it is, how do the facts speak against the verdict?
Never before in Swedish justice history has this law been applied so rigorously as now. The monopoly mail-delivery system has never been trialed for aiding in spreading of illegal content such as child abuse pictures or bombs.
The messaging system has many uses, the trial did not even take this aspect up for discussion. The servers of thepiratebay where raided and with them several sites where taken down and servers where confiscated, still not returned. Some of those where owned by startup companies and completley unrelated to tpb except for sharing the same server room.
I have no knowledge of Swedish law but this argument sounds to melike you are trying to use a loophole. I don't think you need more than basic common sense to see why TPB is guilty while accusing the ISP or the State is a little far fetched. And if their is no law in Sweden that can make the distinction between the two well, there needs to be one.
You're stressing it for lack of an argument.
There are various levels of aiding. Those you described don't count much. In fact, they are fairly neutral: the "wires", for example, are used for millions of non-copyright-infringement uses.
Your "argument" is akin to saying that the company who made the knife in the first place is as much an aid as the guy that held the man getting knifed to death by his accomplice. And maybe their mothers too, because if they hadn't brought them to life, there would be no murder. Is it too much to ask for people to NOT go making far fetched claims and playing every loophole?
Tired argument's like: "It's not stealing, because you only make a copy", "Google aids copyright infringement too", etc, are 1st grade material, not actual arguments worthy of adults.
I can tell that a movie is, for example, a RomCom by looking at it. How do I know a given copy of a specific 50 Cent video is a copyright infringement?
I mention 50 cent because I understand that various artists have released independently produced videos for general distribution. In addition, labels have done the same thing.
Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, TBP is pretty famous for posting takedown notifications: http://static.thepiratebay.se/dreamworks_response.txt
Classy. Surely they were acting in good faith by defying notification since it referenced US instead of Swedish law. As we all know, the appeals process has just proven "no Swedish law is being violated." It is certainly appropriate for TPB to tell the rights holder to "Go fuck yourself." How dare the rights holder demand that TPB not aid in the piracy of their work while TPB, not the work's creators or investors, profit off it.
</sarcasm> It is beyond me how prevalent the opinion is on HN that this court ruling is corrupt. I don't claim to know every relevant detail of this case or Sweedish law, but IMHO, what TPB currently does SHOULD be illegal. However, it seems to me that this is the minority opinion here.
Instead thepiratebay tended to just laugh, and insult people who sent them letters, claiming what they were doing was perfectly legal. It turns out, it appears, that they were wrong.
Eh, well actually, the whole point is that they were convicted, several times, so it's not 'perfectly legal'. You can call a chair a table, but it's still a table, regardless of your insistence that it's not.
You are saying that never ever innocent people are convicted. We all know this is not true, not by a long shot and in no country.
By definition, when someone is convicted, it's because they did something illegal, at least when all appeals are exhausted.
When deciding on guilt in a criminal case like this one, there are several questions a judge answers before coming to a verdict. I won't go into the details, but the ones you are conflating are "did they do what they were charged with", and "is what they did illegal".
"You are saying that never ever innocent people are convicted."
What? I said no such thing, not even remotely. "When innocent people are convicted", it's because they didn't do what they were charged with, yet a judge thought they did do it. In this case, that question is irrelevant: there is no question on whether they did 'it', just on whether what they did was against the law. You said that it's not, which is nonsense - the fact that several judges said it was, and an appeal was rejected, means that yes, what they did was against the law.
(edit: removed dickish snide remarks)
I think these arguments devalue the situation.
Dancing around a legal loophole in a grey area is fun to watch, but one can't complain when it turns out not to work. We (I) expect others to be judged based on obvious intentions as well. I don't want my gov't to tell me one day that they didn't violate my privacy, they just store some large integer numbers forever, who could blame them for that? They're not my numbers! Or that their CCTV system only compares hashes of faces, so it is legal etc. etc...
The only way to change things is to publicly discuss copyright (and US intervention).
The OP goes to great lengths to emphasize TPB's role in Wikileaks and similar cases, I think this makes more sense as a moral defense.
Legal is a court's decision to make. And they made the inverse decision, i.e that it was illegal.
