
Peter Sunde: 'In prison, you become brain-dead' - Libertatea
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/05/sp-pirate-bay-cofounder-peter-sunde-in-prison
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bjourne
I'm very surprised that they still maintain that all their income from
advertising went to pay for their hosting infrastructure. TPB were hosted by
PRQ which were owned by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm. Any bills PRQ
sent them would be them paying themselves.

That part of the story is really fishy to me. TPB has roughly the same type of
advertising as one of the many porn tube sites. But a porn tube visitor easily
costs the site tens of megabytes in streaming video while a torrent tracker
only has to serve a few 10-30kb large torrent files. Yet the tube sites appear
to be able to make some money, but TPB with less than 1% of the bandwidth
costs/visitor couldn't?

~~~
towelguy
I don't see how it is wrong to keep your business and yourself as separate
entities (or your other business in this case). For example, isn't it good
practice to keep track of office renting space even if you are a freelancer
and work from home so you can take it in consideration when deciding how much
to charge for your work?

~~~
gamblor956
What he's saying is that it is extremely suspicious that the TPB guys are
saying they made no money from running TPB, when they had easily less than 1%
of the costs of businesses running similar types and volumes of ads (i.e.,
adult websites), and furthermore, when they were allegedly hosting TPB at
another company that they also owned.

It appears that the TPB guys are claiming that the hosting revenue earned by
the second company should not be treated as the ill-gotten revenue earned by
the TPB, even though they owned and controlled both companies. And indeed,
there are laws in most nations and internationally addressing precisely those
sorts of sketchy relationships.

~~~
vacri
Depends on your bandwidth pricing. Are you sure that adult websites' hosting
bills are 'easily more than 99%' bandwidth charges?

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aragot
At no point in the article do they mention how long is the sentence Sunde has
to serve. It's important because a few months in prison (less than a year
according to the article) is ridiculous compared to most prison sentences.

Of course, that doesn't mean that even a few weeks in prison isn't atrocious.
But a lot of people have been through much more, sometimes when they weren't
even guilty, and didn't have a voice to be heard.

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towelguy
Did prison work? I mean, will he go out and think "piracy is bad!"? If not,
then what was the point?

~~~
frou_dh
Did you read TFA? It said he's not interested in piracy and TPB servers should
have been set on fire years ago as far as he was concerned.

~~~
towelguy
He's not interested in TPB, but what about his thoughts on piracy?

> “People ask if I would have done anything different if I could. The answer
> is no. This has been nothing more than five months of wasted time.”

Prison is supposed to be a place of rehabilitation. If there's no
rehabilitation, there's no point to it.

~~~
frou_dh
He doesn't seem the type that would say on record "yes master, I'll be a good
boy now" if that's what you're looking for.

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xefer
"After the verdict, ​Neij moved to Laos"

Strange timing. He was just arrested:

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/pirate-bays-fredrik-neij-caught-
tha...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/pirate-bays-fredrik-neij-caught-thailand-
border-just-year-before-arrest-warrant-expired-1473128)

~~~
contingencies
Not really. They had been living in the area previously and Neij was married.

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titusjohnson
Warning: Page has ads that play audio unprompted with no immediately apparent
method of disabling it.

~~~
jackmaney
One more reason to surf the web with an ad blocker. :)

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polack
Soon Fredrik Neij will join him. He was arrested in Thailand yesterday and
will be transferred to Sweden in a couple of weeks.

~~~
contingencies
The SMH article I shared explained this was because the MPAA funded a lawyer
to hang around in Thailand. Neij had been in and out of Thailand 30 times (he
lives in Laos with his wife and young family) and the Thai's never cared ..
until the MPAA funded a change in official perspective.

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scotty79
Can prisoners have books? Can't they have computers? Why?

~~~
johansch
They can and do have books, TVs and offline computers.

The article is just whining by someone who tried to escape his prison sentence
for two years and after getting caught (and then bragging about destroying
evidence) is _shocked_ that the system treats him as not being very
trustworthy.

~~~
zethraeus
The comment is just derision by someone who respects the authority of
conventional power and is unsympathetic to someone having a fundamentally
different but consistent stance.

;)

~~~
johansch
You are attacking your perception of me, not my argument. The ";)" is weak
cop-out.

~~~
zethraeus
You're right, it was intended to be read humorously.

The argument I alluded to is that there is an internally consistent viewpoint
in which the government action at hand is genuinely corrupt and supporting
crony capitalism. In this worldview, one that I think there's a strong chance
that Sunde adheres to, he's not being whiney, he's taking rational actions.

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comrade1
I'm surprised a Swedish prison doesn't provide a vegan diet. Prisons in
California provide a number of different diets, although I'm not sure about
vegan. It's a large expense for them.

But that said, I think there are times to give up on your vegan diet having to
do with the culture that you find yourself immersed in. This has nothing to do
with prisons, but if you're traveling in a culture where veganism is unheard
of you should be a good guest and not push your beliefs on them, making your
hosts uncomfortable. Just eat the meat.

In the West veganism is a luxury. A fetish for the rich and it is classist.
Even outside of the West eggs and animal fat (not meat) are an important diet
of many poor people.

~~~
modifier
Morals and ethics, staying true to one's values, that's worth making
sacrifices for. I take it from your comment you don't understand that.

~~~
lnanek2
Traditional Buddhism actually says you should eat meat if it is given to you
as well, and they have been vegetarians centuries longer than the hipsters.
They consider wasting food worse than eating meat. You shouldn't allow
something to be killed for you, but it is a waste if it has already been
killed.

~~~
from_elsewhere
"they have been vegetarians centuries longer than the hipsters"

The implication here seems to be that tradition is a valid justification for
beliefs and practices, whereas personal ethics are not; and indeed, anyone
pursuing the latter is worthy of stereotyping and derision.

To put this thought in other terms: In the context of contemporary culture,
wouldn't you call the Buddha a "hipster"?

