Yep, it seems the court ruled that their intent was to help illegally distribute copyrighted works and sentenced each of the four to 1 year in prison and a $905k fine.
Source: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/
Quite interesting, I think.
This is what amuses me about this line of thinking. You feel you got ripped off by a product that did not meet your expectations. So what response do some on this thread have? Pirating the software! This is the most FOOLISH response you can have. Instead you should never do business with them again! NOT PIRATING THEIR SOFTWARE!
Now in general;
Damn warez/informationshouldbefree/anticapitalist people, do you not understand how your actions affect those of us who have the decency not to engage in software piracy? And please, stop the 'I'm fighting the righteous cause against the evil/greedy/NWO corporations'. It make you look kooky.
[quote who="mcbond" reply="25" id="2149816"]Except that PIRACY IS THEFT! Not really. Pirates don't take anyone's possesions -- all the copies of the game that were legally put up for sale are still there when the pirates get finished. They're violating copyright, which is different (that's why there are a different set of laws for theft versus copyright infringement.) I don't think what they do is right, morally speaking, but just mindlessly equating it to theft isn't helpful either. I think it's more like jumping the fence at a concert. You didn't steal anyone's ticket, but you're also not authorized to be there and are clearly doing something immoral by not paying and not gaining admittance the legal way.
Your analogy is fail. That would be trespassing. As in illegal. Your obfuscating the issue with your bad analogies isn't helping.
Way to totally miss the point in the analogy. Your post is epic fail.
He's saying they are similar because you aren't denying someone else the right to the service/product, in this case a concert, but rather simply using alternative means, in this case tresspassing, to gain access to said service/product.
In the words of a great comedian, "Next time you have a thought, let it go."
I'm glad these guys got jail time. Everyone has the right to profit from their creations. It doesn't matter if its only a copy, its still immoral to take the product of someone's hard work and creativity without their permission. The ability for a person to make a living out of doing something creative is heavily dependant on copyright, and to violate that is to actively attempt to deprive someone of that ability. Its an awful thing to do to someone and if these guys were doing that, bragging about it, and making money from the site they built to do it, they deserve everything they got.
except that they didn't make money by selling the work of others, which you seem to be implying.
They also got something like a million dollars in fines for each of them.
You seem to be missing the point of the matter so I shall attempt to explain: These people DID NOT PIRATE, not directly. They provided a space which was used to pirate.
They are not guilty of piracy, they are guilty of facilitating piracy. People NEED to understand the difference.
In essence, they are guilty of thinking bad thoughts.
They got jail time for thinking that piracy is ok and making it possible for people to pirate, NOT. FOR. PIRATING.
This is not an issue of copyright infringement, it is an issue over whether or not people should be jailed and/or fined for intent over actually committing any crime and whether or not intent is considerable in defining law and punishment.
I'm neither a lawyer nor a supporter of current (c) laws (I obey, but I hate it), but I'm pretty sure you're tossing a red herring here.
They did not *directly* pirate software, but neither did they simply think pirating is OK. They provided resources to enable pirating, which is at least roughly analgous to, say, giving a loaded gun to a friend who's just come to rant at you about how their spouse is right now in the marriage bed committing adultery. They call that "being an accessory," I think.
Well, I did say that they facilitated piracy.
The thing is, in Sweden what they did is legal. The only thing that they did was know that piracy was taking place.
They provided a space for filesharing. Not illegal in Sweden, period. The fact that piracy was going on and they knew about it and probably supported should be irrelevant to their being jailed, but still was the consideration in the verdict. This is a no different from jailing someone for thinking bad thoughts.
The fact remains that they did not break the law at all. In your analogy it would be akin to placing a loaded gun on a table and watching someone you don't know come in a take it, later to murder somebody with it.
By your reasoning anybody who sells a gun to someone else is potentially an accessory to murder. Don't forget that we're talking about another country with another set of laws.
Napster, Kazaa, Oink, Grokster.... now The Pirate Bay. The efforts of record companies are nothing else than Whack-A-Mole strategy. When will they learn ? The world has changed. Technology advances made old business models obsolete and there's no going back. That copyright ifringement is currently illegal changes little. It won't stop technological progress. Law is not for it's own sake, law is made to serve the people.Data from 18th April:
Socialdemokraterna (s) 100639 members - 2006 elections: 1,942,625 votes - 34.99% - 130 seatsModeraterna (m) 54858 members - 2006 elections: 1,456,014 votes - 26.23% - 97 seatsCentern (c) 47866 members - 2006 elections: 437,389 votes - 7.88% - 29 seatsKristdemokraterna (kd) 22919 members - 2006 elections: 365,998 votes - 6.59% - 24 seatsPiratpartiet (pp) 19693 members - 2006 elections: 34,918 votes - 0.63% - 0 seatsFolkpartiet (fp) 17799 members - 2006 elections: 418,395 votes - 7.54% - 28 seatsVänsterpartiet (v) 10700 members - 2006 elections: 324,722 votes - 5.85% - 22 seatsMiljöpartiet (mp) 9110 members - 2006 elections: 291,121 votes - 5.24% - 19 seats
Youth parties:
Ung Pirat (up) 9400Moderata ungdomsförbundet (muf) 9153Sveriges socialdemokratiska ungdomsförbund (ssu) 5431
Apparently a lot of people in Sweden think Ung Pirat and Piratpartiet represent their interests best. They vote, because unlike some other countries I might name, Sweden uses proportional system for voting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Sweden#Seat_allocation
Less than a week before the 2006 elections, the Green Party shifted their stance on copyright reform.[9] Additionally, both the Moderate Party and the Left Party changed their stances on internet downloads,[10][11] and both prime minister candidates stated publicly that it shouldn't be illegal for young people to share files.[12] Several influential analysts have credited the Pirate Party and its rising popularity for this shift in the political climate; these include a panel of senior editors at International Data Group[13] and political analysts at the largest morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter.[14] Additionally, the Swedish Minister of Justice, Thomas Bodström, announced on June 9 that he was willing to negotiate a possible revision of the law introduced in 2005 that made unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material illegal, introducing a new tax on broadband Internet access, but he later denied having changed his stance on the issue.[15]
After the 2006 elections, the issue has faded away from the public debate somewhat.[12] In January 2008 seven Swedish members of parliament from the Moderate Party, member of the governing coalition, authored a piece in a Swedish tabloid calling for the complete decriminalization of filesharing. The Swedish members of parliament wrote that "Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet."[16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party
If things keep their current direction, Swedes may be able change their law so that you can share files in accordance with the law. Given that Piratpartiet has gained over 3000 members in 7 hours after the TPB verdict, the movement is still gaining momentum. Remember, law is for the people, not people for the law.
There are still ways to earn money in a world full of pirates. Subscription (Demigod) is one and it seems to be working. I don't mind that they charge for server access. From experience I know server administration is a demanding task. You have to keep track of many things, security holes and fixes, load balancing, buy or replace hardware, power outages etc. This means constant costs proportional to price you pay for service. Other models are ad-supported games (lots of current flash games, but I'm also interested how Battlefield Heroes and QUake LIve turn out). Grant (pledge) model is currently not widely used, although it's supposedly used for freeware games. Musicians can perform on concerts, sell merch. Studio-based musicians can still make music for movies, games etc.
You do realize maintaining a web page (and coding the "peer" feeder itself) while hosting it in the virtual space isn't intent, do you?
I can only repeat my earlier question to PROVE there are plenty of software solutions for anyone willing to grab a whole bunch of money from online users paypal'ing their ways into monthly costs; Any Rapidshare Premium Zone users, here?
Law(s) must be enforced in a court of Justice... can you count how many such systems are in the world, right now?
Identify who's interests they are protecting?
What if anything could CONSTITUTIONALLY favor both sides of a very complex equation simply because it has no global meaning or impact?
UN should step in, rather than chasing War Criminals "only" to bring the process in The Hague -- they must start thinking about what the economic consequences are in terms of actual worldwide recession conditions. They must evaluate what the honest or optimal Industrial/Consuming ratio is or was actually decaying ever since Piracy of products came into existence.
Businesses will shut down forever if nothing gets done at the International level.
How about Fiscal paradises?
Banking the high tides and swapping the rewards of Capitalization through money laundring?
Privacy rights or outright criminality?
The only good pirate (including those who justify 'trying out a game before purchasing' by using torrents, not demos) is a pirate who has been hurtled into outer space on a missle bound for Saturn; with no space suit.
Muppet, you fail civics.
I think sleeping around is immoral, if we started locking up lechers I'd be really really worried. I'd let a spouse off the hook for knocking off their significant other for cheating on them, I'd still be worried. When law is ignored and someone is convicted of a fictitious crime "because they deserve it", no good will come of it. Vigilantism is less dangerous to the integrity of the legal system than vigilantism by the legal system itself.
For the worst and an upcoming collapse of industrialization itself.
As a result, markets are still plunging. Jobs are lost. Unemployment rates inching their statistics above 15% in a few countries. Record deficits.
World food bank warning of famines. Give too much money to the rich, they'll spend it. Make any GM cars with tax-payers funds. Protect investors rather than population_S.
Gee, how pessimistic?
Truth & facts - observe if you dare.
Some of us thinks there's still hope yet for humanity. Cuz, it makes sense.
This should come with a huge "WARNING: DRAMATIZATION" sticker on it.
Courts make new rulings all the time. How many cases these days cite various precedents that held up? When the initial case was ruled on, that was a "first" just as this is. If a new ruling/potential precedent is considered vigilantism, then we've been living it for as long as courts existed.
Says the guy that lives in a country where the law is ignored on a regular basis by judges. We have judges letting child molesters off the hook because it's just a lifestyle choice and they didn't really rape that ten year old, but I'm just being dramatic.
That's the thing in the U.S. though isn't it, one of the scariest things for life and law here...
The courts can choose to ignore issues even when they are against the U.S. Constitution if there is a precedent to back it up. It takes a hell of a lot to finally back courts into a corner and get them to pronounce something as unconstitutional. Case in point, the civil rights movements of the mid 20th century.
Having a precedent for an action is more important than any laws governing that action, which is why this event in Sweden is so scary to me.
Says the guy who claimed someone else failed civics.
The pretty bumper sticker is that "We have a government of laws, not men." The vexing truth is that all laws are language constructs, inevitably bound to constant interpretation in a given moment and also subject to the evolution of languages and cultures in the long term. The so-called "strict constructionists" have just found an interesting way to brand their agenda space when it comes to arguing law. Seriously, when the framers built the original US Constitution, spelling (and capitalization, for that matter) was a matter of taste and breeding, not print-based lexical authority. Daniel Webster was a child when the bleeding thing was ratified.
But I digress. There's less than nothing wrong with pillorying a judge because you disagree with the ruling, but there's nothing at all helpful in flinging around rhetorical shorthand that asserts there is some simple, unchanging basis for law. Law is complicated even in non-democratic systems, and when you let the demos into the courts, it just gets messier. Permanently, if the demos is lucky.
Well I was going chime in here again, but given I just read a post that clearly illustrates the "topic of the day" in this thread, instead of doing my own I decided to post that one here for everyone's edification. It is as follows:
Xanrel(from ARS) You don't have a right to entertainment products, and it isn't your rights that are being trampled on, it's the creators of that entertainment. Sometimes I get tired of defending the pirates, but this is the sort of hypocrisy that can't be left to stand. You are implicitly claiming that your work is "art" and thus so important to the public good that it is deserving of the social contract of copyright. To then, in the same breath, proclaim that it is just "entertainment" and that the public has no legitimate need for it, well, it's an inherent contradiction. Either there exists a moral need for and right to art and our collective culture sufficient to justify reasonable copyright to promote its creation, or the art is just "entertainment" that nobody really needs or has a right to and is thus not deserving of copyright protection. You can't have it both ways. And you can't reconcile the former with life + forever copyright terms. If the public needs art enough to justify copyright then eventually the art needs to belong to the public. If copyright is short then it is legitimate to go on about evil pirates violating the social contract because they won't pay and are too impatient to wait for the copyright to expire. But when the copyright to a work will not expire until long after we are all dead, the public is being denied their rightful access to that work.
Xanrel(from ARS)
Sometimes I get tired of defending the pirates, but this is the sort of hypocrisy that can't be left to stand. You are implicitly claiming that your work is "art" and thus so important to the public good that it is deserving of the social contract of copyright. To then, in the same breath, proclaim that it is just "entertainment" and that the public has no legitimate need for it, well, it's an inherent contradiction. Either there exists a moral need for and right to art and our collective culture sufficient to justify reasonable copyright to promote its creation, or the art is just "entertainment" that nobody really needs or has a right to and is thus not deserving of copyright protection. You can't have it both ways.
And you can't reconcile the former with life + forever copyright terms. If the public needs art enough to justify copyright then eventually the art needs to belong to the public. If copyright is short then it is legitimate to go on about evil pirates violating the social contract because they won't pay and are too impatient to wait for the copyright to expire. But when the copyright to a work will not expire until long after we are all dead, the public is being denied their rightful access to that work.
I actually just realized I linked the wrong article.
Oops. I was googling for one that I remembered reading and thought was good, and saw the picture of Johnny Depp and assumed it was the same article, but it wasn't. I actually agree that Bruce's article is mostly crap.... I should have checked my links. Sorry I put you through reading that. *facepalm*
The one I was actually thinking of was this one: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
It's a much more balanced view, with actual data. I would highly suggest it.
You: GRAAAAAAAAAAAAA I HATE COMMERCIALS AND SO I PIRATE TV!
Yeah, I know, that's what I said. My main question was this:
Which you mostly answered with:
I'm not sure this is sustainable. Hulu currently works economically because the major networks get most of their funding from actual TV and the ad sponsors they have there. They put up Hulu to capture a share of the pirate market, who wasn't watching commercials anyway. Hulu isn't an attempt to capture existing regular TV watchers or people who love hi-def; if they all switched over, the major networks would collapse. How much will a company pay for one or two short Hulu ads? Is that revenue enough to sustain high budget shows like Lost? Right now, I doubt it. There's also a bigger problem, in that even though you seem ok with watching a small amount of ads, the majority of pirates will still complain of any ads at all, and just pirate the TV show rather than watching it on something like Hulu. That's what TV pirates are currently doing now.
And I'm still wondering what the solution would be for games. You can't give them away for free. And asking for donations is not going to work. Should games be ad-supported too? I don't want them to be. I'd rather buy them.
This argument is so full of logic holes, assumptions, and faulty reasoning it's 'entertaining'.
I think the biggest issue with this is that the ruling does not stop the site. The piracy will go on, as will ad revenues etc.
They /technically/ had nothing other than a website hosted. They didn't actually store any files. I mean, I see all these people celebrating a huge win and victory against piracy, but really, this isn't it. This doesn't stop piracy, it isn't even a blow to piracy. Four people, who don't have the money to pay if they wanted too were given jail time but nothing was done about the reason or the crime.
As it was said:
They were an Acessory to piracy, the problem with that is- they were as much an acessory to piracy as a cars salesman is to drunk driving. By selling cars the salesman provides the means for drunk driving. By hosting the servers, they provided the means for piracy.
What sort of implication does this have?
Oh come on, don't be shy. Saying it's full of this and that doesn't make it so. Show us your master reasoning skills, we could learn from you.
pedal2000:
That great majority of people don't understand technology enough to avoid bad analogies.
What about single player games? If the only way to make any money is to make people play online, then you're going to end up with crippled single-player campaigns with all the effort going into multiplayer. And once that happens, people will feel the need to pirate multiplayer and use private servers because the smaller single-player focus will be "crap".
This is sort of the trend now in PC gaming. The publishers have started to agree that online-only games with strong user authorization are the only way to make money in the PC market. That's not a good thing in my mind. I like single-player games.
That would require strong DRM, and everyone (pirates and nonpirates) go on and on and on about how much they hate DRM. Legitimate customers would hate to have to constantly log on to the internet and have the game track the amount of time they play. I know I would hate it; I'd much rather just buy the game and have it. Plus, this would be fairly easy to crack.
Professional 3D software is MASSIVELY pirated... almost every home user who uses it has a pirated copy. The 3D software companies make their money almost entirely by selling to other businesses. Business software is easier to sell, because other businesses don't want to break the law; they need to keep records of their expenses and be able to enforce their own copyright when they make art or games.
But in game terms, what you're describing is a demo. There are lots of games with demos, and some that have timed trials. They still are massively pirated, because the pirates think they shouldn't have to pay for the game at all because it's "crap" and "buggy" and "half-finished", or that it's made by an evil greedy corporation who deserves to be stolen from. I thought the whole thing you were arguing against (at least what most pirates are arguing against) is the entire concept of having to pay for games. If all you want are more demos, then maybe you should ask the companies you like to provide them, rather than stealing their products.
Well, they ARE adapting. That's what DRM, online-only, and moving everything off of PC and to the consoles is. But pirates don't seem to actually want them to "adapt", they seem to want them to give away everything for free.
Yes, please, do finish typing.
To put it fondly, "They're doing it wrong".
Seriously, DRM has driven me off certain products. If I buy I a game, I want to run it 10 years from now, I want to install it as many times as I need too and I want to be able to play it while I'm travelling on my laptop.
Pirates? DRM, Online only, all of that doesn't stop pirates. It just hurts loyal customers. I haven't seen a single game produced by anyone that didn't get pirated if it was tried. Online or not, even WoW is pirated. Trying to stop pirates from cracking your game is the wrong way to approach it, you have to always (as Stardock assumes) that there will be people who will always pirate games. Always. And from there, you have to consider A. How to get as much of the paying base to pay, and B. How to get those pirates who would pay, to pay.
In the case of A. It's making a good game, with good solid adveritisng. In the case of B, you don't need advertising so much as you need a good game and well, to be honest some luck. If someone just bought another game, chances are you're going to get the buck passed over you.
Webster was hardly the first person to write a dictionary, his wasn't even that good. Oxfords in the same time period was vastly more extensive.
The Constitution is crystal clear on the matter regardless of your brainwashing for an education. Legislatures make law, not judges. Common law is the reason article one dictates specifically on the matter of ex post facto law. It's a regular occurance as can be seen by these shmucks being convicted of a crime that didn't exist.
Edit: Note to self, refresh the fucking page first when you forget to post a reply...
Makeshiftwing, I'm going to paraphrase your contribution to humanity. Now channeling stupid.
Hi, I'm a dick that misquotes people on purpose.
End of channeling.
Fuck off, shit for brains.
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