Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline (opens in new tab)

Actually, this isn't as relevant as it seems. The parole judges in the study are given a steady stream of cases, without deliberation. There's also a clear default: "no"

Some court decisions fit that mold, but many do not. Often, court decisions have no default, and the judge retires to consider the arguments.

The study in question was very important for showing that humans are often not guided by rationality. But it's not necessarily a great demonstration of how all legal decisions are made.

It's a mix of both. There are judges that don't care about the technical details -- that's wrong. But there are also people who think they won't be convicted of a crime because of an irrelevant technical detail. The fact that you disclosed the existence of a secret warrant by removing your warrant canary, for example, is highly unlikely to make a judge think you did nothing wrong.

The argument that the Swedish judges and prosecution make is that, though ThePirateBay does not necessarily host the pirated content, the site causes pirated content to be disseminated massively, and it exists solely to facilitate piracy. I don't personally agree with this, but I can't deny it's pretty hard to refute this claim when you literally named your website "The Pirate Bay."

In the U.S., you have strict evidentiary rules and the opportunity to get expert testimony into the record. If the judge doesn't know HTTP from UDP, you get a Stanford PhD expert witness to explain it. If your opponent mischaracterizes the distinction, you comb over the transcripts and get your expert to submit a declaration picking apart each instance of mischaracterization. Everything goes in a voluminous record that is dissected on appeal.[1]

In my opinion, in the U.S., courts rarely get technology straight-up wrong. What technologists call "not understanding technology" is usually more an artifact of judges not sharing the same values. I.e. just because a judge understands the difference between a torrent and the actual file doesn't mean they're going to be sympathetic to an "information wants to be free" attitude towards copyright.

[1] Of course, this is one reason litigation in the U.S. is so expensive and time-consuming.

It's not different, and I believe that was the point. There is a weird stereotype that I've encountered about Sweden that I wasn't aware of until the first time I lived outside of our country...whenever something like this comes along, there's a notion that some people think "Oh it's Sweden, they'll do the right thing," as if our laws or courts are somehow "more right" or "more just" than others. I think what the preceding comment was trying to point out is that that is not always true.

It's not, but depending on the country not every judicial system has the same weird regulations as the US one. For example hearsay, evidence without a clear chain of custody, and many other things that would be thrown out of a US court are accepted in most other western countries. The Judges know how to deal with that evidence and under which circumstances except it or not, some one lost a tag on an evidence bag doesn't really scares them, the evidence came from an "unofficial" source, as long as it's credible they'll take it in and so on.

That Swedish courts do not have to worry about how evidence is obtained. It can always be used.

It's obviously hyperbole.

The very same argument could be made about your comment.

People DO vote with their wallet by straight up not paying for the material, or did you forget what thread you were in?

We do have quality games and movies, but not all movies and games are going to be considered of a high quality by all people.

Obviously a lot of people think they are of sufficient quality to be worth watching/playing.

Times change, and technology changes value. Scored music "screwed" street performers, then recordings "screwed" concert performers, then the internet "screwed" recording artists.

Plenty of artists have successfully adapted and are doing great. Others have sheltered behind curators and promoters like labels. Others have failed to deliver what people want and they are screwed. That's capitalism at work.

I don't understand why we should hold back progress so that existing artists can be sheltered from needing to adapt and provide a product people want to pay for.

I say this as a former small-time producer of club tracks and a current software developer.

Additionally, you should ask artists who's screwing them before you start pointing fingers. Many artists would kill to have their music downloaded. Much of the screwing comes from the big labels that reap almost all of the profits.

> We've gone from the old pre-Internet system, which screwed artists most of the time, to a new system that screws artists all the time.

In general you make some valid points and I think I understand where you're coming from - as an artist. I strongly believe though, that the pre-Internet system screwed artists because the Internet itself did not exist.

The screwing is coming from the music industry itself. People are still paying for music, it is still (and probably more than ever) a multi billion business. Yet, true, authentic talent don't get the attention/compensation they deserve, why?

Because the big players control who gets what. And that's what they're trying to do when fighting internet piracy, control the distribution. They're not interested in small time artists, they're not fighting for you.

I truly believe that all small time artists should embrace the internet, it's their only true hope to get the attention they deserve, for free. Money will come afterwards. After all, a few companies and a few more monkeys probably get more money than the rest 95%, the internet can split some of that more equally.

EDIT: syntax, trying to make sense

> I don't understand why there's so much sympathy for industrial-scale piracy

Most distribution channels make it SO MUCH HARDER to do the right thing vs grabbing a torrent. Steam has its problems, but that was the first commercial distribution channel that seemed to generate a ton of loyalty. What Steam provided was objectively better than the hassle and danger of finding a random binary.

Now days, I stick to iTunes and Netflix for movies. If it's not there, i'm not watching. If the artist isn't big enough to cut a deal with apple they may as well not exist. I'm not really sure which is better.

That's kind of a shame, because i'm willing to spend a little money to watch stuff. But i'm not willing to screw around searching for your work, then installing some ridiculous player software. I'll just go do something else instead.

Exactly. People are just good at rationalizing their behaviour. I don't judge anybody who uses such sites, but what really pisses me off are the guys who like to shout some self-aggrandizing bullshit about fighting for freedom etc. Theres a basic lack of empathy.

The for profit part is only because it's not allowed to be financed by legal means. I'm sure that sharing was free for non-commercial purposes, there would be not-for-profit organizations that would run websites and only gather enough money (via ads, subscriptions, etc) to cover their operational expenses.

Are you not familiar with the distinction between manslaughter and the varying degrees of murder? Intent plays a huge part in the legal system.

> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit.

Plenty of specific crimes, do, in fact, have seeking a material reward/exchange as a required element of the offense, and the act that is criminal when done for profit is legal (or, if still illegal, illegal under a different provision which often has a lesser punishment) when done without that exchange.

> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that. But, at least in US law, there is a major distinction between commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. Both are illegal, of course, but they are treated very differently.

> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit.

That's decidedly not true.

Per your example:

> Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.

The people responsible for dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima were not considered criminals and did not go to jail or get punished at all.

War acts are always rationalized by their consequences and the intent behind them.

But this is way off-topic.

Someone already mentioned that copyright laws do indeed distinguish between "commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement".

Actually, I'd argue that even ethically they are treated differently.

If I bought a movie then shared it with my friends, no one would think I'm doing something that's unethical.

If I started selling or renting that movie to my classmates, it's more controversial.

> Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit.

Man, wouldn't that be a better world? But in the world we live in right now, lots and lots of actions are illegal for profit and legal otherwise.

Huge difference man.

Google's business is not centered around providing pirated material. The fact that it happens is accidental.

The pirate bay, on the other hand, (as clearly suggested by its name), does infact center around providing access to pirated material.

So that's who is responsible for those horrible popup ads that TPB has been using. I fear for anyone browsing pirate bay without noscript and adblock.

Edit: typo

It can be considered contributory copyright infringement if you're knowingly linking to copyright infringing material.

In the US, abiding by any DMCA takedown notices is enough to be fairly certain you are not going to be in trouble for contributory infringement. That's how Google covers itself.

What about Youtube? It streams huge amounts of illegal content everyday, and it's not just indexing it, but actually hosting the content. Frankly, there would be no YT as it is today if it wasn't hosting tones of music videos illegally.

The problem is that when you start to make things like that illegal, you are actually just banning numbers.

You might if the phone company not only knew about it, but marketed itself on its willingness to look the other way when callers used its network for illegal activity, and encouraged the idea of using its network for hits-for-hire to the degree that it called itself "Assassins' Telephone and Telegraph" and made a logo of a crosshairs for its website.

Not really, because one can easily argue that cassettes have "substantial non-infringing use". It's a little harder to argue for that in the case of TPB.

Some people "copied" while others "backed up".

I only used them as storage for my ZX Spectrum !

If they willingly put them out there with the intent to facilitate crime, yes.

Ironically enough, sub-second music IP rights swap between the shell corps, so as to dodge any lawsuits getting anything out of them.

Worked great too, unless you discount the whole "convert the earth into computronium" in later chapters implying it's origin from the same subsystems.

Not a mirror, a proxy. It doesn't work when the main site is down.

In a fully decentralized environment, you would need to somehow know who to trust and make some karma/feedback in a decentralized way.

Given that PGP's web of trust never really caught on, I am not sure if this would work.

But maybe it would and I am just too pesimistic.

The pirate bay has a comment system, and an option to verify torrents are uploaded by someone. It's possible to implement those in a p2p way, but than it comes close to the improved systems on silk road with reputation ,etc - so maybe they prefer not to go there.

I actually made a magnet link archive a year and something back ( http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/ ), mostly as an experiment

Only the magnets and names - 76 MB; all the magnets + descriptions + comments - 631 MB

It's not that workable for any particular usage (other then statistics I guess) and I never upgraded it since then. There were some attempts by other people to regularly archive TPB (and semi-mirror sites like torrentz.eu and bitsnoop were "mirroring it" by reposting its torrents until the very end) but I am not sure if somebody actually dumped it online regularly in an archive

I don't think it's intended as the main mean of consumption, just as yet another measure to make sure it's hard to destroy the information.

True, and I would love to see a solution to it, but downloading an archive makes it at least a little bit less centralized.

Curious about this too.

(If I understand your question correctly,) sure, but it would instantly be outdated, because you can't include the torrent you just created.

Possible a magnet to the magnet bundle?

Anna Troberg stepped down? I can't find documentation of this.

edit: found it.

http://piratetimes.net/leading-swedish-pirates-step-down/