
Pirate Bay Founders’ Prison Sentences Final, Supreme Court Appeal Rejected - forza
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founders-prison-sentences-final-supreme-court-appeal-rejected-120201/
======
rickmb
Wow. This is has probably been one of the most corrupt legal processes Western
Europe has seen since WWII. Unbelievable how a foreign industry has made a
complete mockery out of the justice system of a sovereign nation.

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.

~~~
andrewfelix
I agree it's a crappy verdict, but what makes you say it's corrupt?

~~~
gitarr
Maybe because the facts speak against the verdict?

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.

~~~
CJefferson
Why are you sure it is perfectly legal?

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?

~~~
DrCatbox
Aiding in copyright infrigement, aiding is the key word. The ISPs carrying the
signals and the state putting down the wire has been aiding the infrigement.
The Linux servers running the torrent site and the collocation facilities are
aiding in the infrigement.

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.

~~~
batista
_Aiding in copyright infrigement, aiding is the key word. The ISPs carrying
the signals and the state putting down the wire has been aiding the
infrigement. The Linux servers running the torrent site and the collocation
facilities are aiding in the infrigement._

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.

~~~
doki_pen
I disagree. I'm definitely an adult and I don't think copyrighte infringement
is stealing. We can have an intelligent discussion about the morality of
copyright infringement, but calling it stealing is spinning.

------
sgentle
It would appear that it's a mistake to commit white collar crime without being
an American bank. [1][2][3][4]

[1] "70% of early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their
original loan applications" -
[http://www.anu.edu.au/fellows/jbraithwaite/_documents/Articl...](http://www.anu.edu.au/fellows/jbraithwaite/_documents/Articles/diagnostics_white_collarcrime.pdf)

[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...](http://www.neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/09/william-black-why-
nobody-went-to-jail.html)

[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...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-
jail-20110216?page=4)

~~~
VMG
This is very interesting and disturbing, but I fail to see what this has to do
with a lawsuit in Sweden. As far as I am aware these two events are unrelated.

~~~
sgentle
Only related in the sense that they reflect US government priorities for white
collar prosecution. Their state department has been leaning on Sweden for some
time to clean up The Pirate Bay [1]. And there's, of course, the recent
MegaUpload news. Copyright enforcement is a critical issue for them, corporate
malfeasance is not.

[1] <http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09STOCKHOLM141.html#par12>

------
wyclif
The worst part of this is the assorted fines imposed on the founders of TPB.
The prison sentences probably won't amount to much...I don't expect brokep to
serve time (I have been following his situation for years now), which is good
news.

~~~
yason
Exactly. The best way to obliterate a young adult from the society forever is
to slash him with fines that he just can't and won't pay. There are several
cases like this in Finland, namely few kids who ran a p2p sharing hub (without
sharing any of the files, just running the server, AFAIK).

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?

~~~
roel_v
"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.

~~~
mikehuffman
Perhaps he means liberty in the sense of freedom from being America's lapdog.
One might be considered a "liberty fighter" for wanting to be held accountable
by their own country's morals and mores, and not at the insistence of another
country. The method "free music and videos", might be irrelevant to that
perspective.

------
Tooluka
At least that was Swedish court. Had it been in the USA they could have faced
4, 6 and 10 years of imprisonment, and $6.8 trillion damage to the RIAA and
MPAA.

~~~
andrewfelix
I was thinking the same thing. I know prison isn't a wonderful place to be.
But I think dotcom would be stoked with a 4-10month sentence.

Having said that, it's still over the top for posting links.

~~~
hessenwolf
I'll just leave this here:

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'

<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3261698,00.html>

~~~
dchest
Hehe, there's this Russian comedy movie "Хочу в тюрму"
(<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167231/>) where a guy, after losing his job,
sees a TV documentary about European prisons, and decides to go to the
Netherlands from Russia specifically to try to get into prison.

------
itmag
Good luck finding them.

<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.

~~~
toyg
That would be the worst response. For the justice system they are now low-
profile, minor white-collar thieves, it's all just a bunch of paperwork and
bribes, with a bit of lawyering they probably won't even do time. Once they
start absconding, they become fugitives and show up on all the wrong radars.
Offenses start piling up automatically, and unless they manage to run to Santo
Domingo (which would involve more felonies), they _will_ be caught and sent
away for years, not months.

~~~
hobin
"they _will_ be caught"

That's debatable. Not that I'd want them to run, but getting caught is in no
way a certain thing.

~~~
sliverstorm
If you play russian roulette with four friends, it is in no way a certain
thing that someone will lose, but given the odds and the stakes, it's best to
assume it as a near-certainty.

~~~
hobin
The difference with Russian roulette is, of course, that your skills/wits make
no to very little difference. When trying to avoid the authorities, it does
(or at least I'd like to think so). But, like I said, I would not encourage
those people to run, my point was more along the lines of "now, now, chaps,
let's not get overly dramatic". ;)

------
x3c
With the ludicrous patent wars going on among the biggest tech players,
increasing piracy and ever-increasing cases of countries bending over
backwards to placate entertainment industries; the whole Intellectual Property
paradigm is ripe for disruption. The sad part is that the prevalent political
practices will make it very difficult to come to a reasonable solution, a
point of stable equilibrium. Consumer advocacy and freedom rights' groups have
a very feeble voice right now and this issue will take a lot of activism and
rationality from the common folk before it can reach a sane conclusion. I only
hope issue doesn't undo the leaps humanity took when internet was invented
(and I'm not exaggerating)!

------
jopt
Now that these three have been charged with "paying back what was stolen," all
our file-sharing is off the hook, right?

------
pwthornton
Am I the only one who doesn't feel bad for these guys? The Pirate Bay was
always set up to try to infringe copyright, and I don't consider it a
legitimate form of civil disobedience.

I don't like the MPAA, RIAA and others either, but sites like the TPB are not
helping matters.

~~~
grecy
> The Pirate Bay was always set up to try to infringe copyright

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

------
rplnt
For hosting file hashes and connecting people with same hashes. For free (only
search engine was polluted with ads, you didn't have to use it though). In no
way is this comparable to what Megaupload (and others) were/are doing.

------
trebor
We have something in America called "being an accessory" to the crime. This
means that you stood by without attempting to stop the crime, even though you
learned that it was about to happen.

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_.

~~~
thebigshane
I don't agree with trebor here but I have a problem with him being downvoted.
He has clearly laid out an intelligent (albeit unpopular) opinion and you may
disagree, but why downvote? Maybe if he was factually wrong (he isn't) or not
contributing to the discussion (he is) or was in some way offensive (he isn't
offending me at least)...

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).

~~~
trebor
Shane,

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...

~~~
thebigshane
I'd rather not debate over whether or not (digital content) piracy _is_ theft,
but surely the matter is not "pure and simple".

Free speech is absolutely an issue here (maybe not the main issue). TPB hosts
torrent files. "A torrent is data about a target file, though it contains no
information about the content of the file. The only data that the torrent
holds is information about the location of different pieces of the target
file" [1] This is would be like Joe telling someone how to do something
illegal, like how to sneak into a movie theater without paying. You could
claim that this would make Joe an accomplice to the person who successfully
uses his advice, but others will also claim that Joe still has the right to
say it. You may argue that it is what is, and under US law, it means Joe is an
accomplice, but others sympathize with Joe. That's why people are defending
TPB here. It may perfectly legal what the gov't are doing, but we still don't
like it. Even _if_ we agree that TPB is mainly devoted to assisting the
infringement of copyrights, the cost/benefit ratio favors "Big Media" way more
than anyone else (even combined) and the costs are too Orwellian.

The bigger issue to me though is that this interference is being pushed by
companies (in fact, companies that I despise). Like Exxon pushing our gov't to
push other countries to do things to maximize Exxon's profits. Or Halliburton.
Or Monsanto, etc.

I blame the US (and Sweden) for being weak (and somewhat corruptible) but the
real blame is on the MPAA and friends.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_file>

------
Evernoob
With SOPA, ACTA, PIPA, the MegaUpload situation and now this, these really are
dark times for the internet.

------
GigabyteCoin
This is oddly opportunistic timing.

~~~
nextparadigms
MPAA and RIAA must be trying to change the public's and the politicians'
opinion that these "piracy" sites really are really guilty, so they might as
well give them the laws they need to bypass due process and "streamline" the
whole process, so they don't "waste time" fighting all the similar sites which
now we "know" are guilty.

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.

