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Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#141

Post by meowface »

jbaptiste wrote: post #92
bjornsteffanson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pre…

That's very true. In Europe, Sweden is in our minds like one of the two or three countries where everything seems to be "good". Economics are good, people are nice, unemployment seems low and somehow those countries act as "The goods and respectables guys from the north". That's a very common feeling in EU.

The same sentiment is held by many in the US. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are viewed as more modern and civilized societies.

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#142

Post by hasenj »

tomp wrote: post #129
hasenj wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really; it centers on providing access to material that it's users want (except certain categories, e.g. child pornography). The fact that it's mostly pirated content stems mostly from the fact that it's prohibited almost everywhere else on the internet. But, your point is very important in a legal sense - a simple, but effective way to build a better TPB would be to center it around some other cause, and have it…

Like bittorrent :)

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#143

Post by pdabbadabba »

ObviousScience wrote: post #137
thirsteh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Warrant canaries actually are a relevant distinction: the state has the ability to compel you not to reveal something, but rarely if ever the ability to compel you to speak, outside of testifying (at least, in the US). Dismissing them trying to exercise a different power than the one they're granted by the law as a "technicality" is a disservice to the rule of law. It's not a mere technicality, it's a fundamentally d…

> but rarely if ever the ability to compel you to speak, outside of testifying (at least, in the US).

I don't think this is at all true. A U.S. judge would not hesitate to issue an injunction ordering you to update your warrant canary if they thought there was a good reason to do so. I'm not aware of any law (including the Fifth Amendment -- which deals only with self-incrimination in a criminal proceeding) that would prevent them from doing so. Am I missing something?

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#144

Post by pdabbadabba »

WildUtah wrote: post #134
rayiner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

"... in the U.S., courts rarely get technology straight-up wrong." Except, of course, the patent courts -- the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and their pet district courts in East Texas. In those courts the judges have a personal career interest in how technology is regulated by the patent system. The result is that judges are competent but motivated to use reasoning to reach personally beneficial conclusio…

> personal career interest

Quite an accusation, but I have no idea what you could be referring to. What's the interest? It can't just be that they need to keep the patents flowing for the sake of job security, since they already have life tenure...

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#145

Post by PhasmaFelis »

mrkickling wrote: post #32

The organisation that reported Thepiratebay and therefore is the reason for this raid is called Rättighetsalliansen (The Alliance of Rights). The Alliance of Rights is the same organisation as The Anti Pirate Bureau but with a new name. This is what they say on their website (roughly translated): "The police raided The Pirate Bay today inside an Internet company in the Stockholm region. Rättighetsalliansen is behind…

> In other words they don't now what they are talking about. Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are (of course nothing is even uploaded, only seeded from user to user).

If someone were to say in conversation "Yeah, I downloaded Casablanca from Pirate Bay last night," would you immediately reply, "You don't know what you're talking about! You didn't download it from Pirate Bay, but from dozens of different peers, idiot!"

You must be fun at parties.

(And while we're nitpicking, torrents certainly do involve "uploads" and "downloads". Get your pedantry straight.)

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#146

Post by bello »

dil8 wrote: post #120
vacri wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are Knowingly and willingly facilitating crime is usually a crime in itself. As a clear example, if you pay a hitman to kill someone, you didn't do the killing, but you facilitated the crime.

Cassettes were used to copy music in the past, are you saying that cassette manufacturers were committing a crime?

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.

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#147

Post by nroets »

dil8 wrote: post #120
vacri wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are Knowingly and willingly facilitating crime is usually a crime in itself. As a clear example, if you pay a hitman to kill someone, you didn't do the killing, but you facilitated the crime.

Cassettes were used to copy music in the past, are you saying that cassette manufacturers were committing a crime?

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

I only used them as storage for my ZX Spectrum !

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#148

Post by harryh »

WildUtah wrote: post #134
rayiner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

"... in the U.S., courts rarely get technology straight-up wrong." Except, of course, the patent courts -- the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and their pet district courts in East Texas. In those courts the judges have a personal career interest in how technology is regulated by the patent system. The result is that judges are competent but motivated to use reasoning to reach personally beneficial conclusio…

The breadth of software patents isn't expanding, it's contracting.

Re: Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

#149

Post by darrikmazey »

res0nat0r wrote: post #139
gargantian wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a great apology. I agree with you that it's troubling that a new model for monetizing free work isn't coalescing -- in art, open source, writing, and more. I've personally felt the sting of all of these. However, I don't blame the downloaders or the Pirate Bays. People want what they want, and Pirate Bay managed to provide that to people: a download index for the price of an ad or a drive-by download…

> I think if you can't convince people to hand over money for what you've made, then what you've made simply isn't valuable. They aren't paying because there is pretty much a zero percent chance of getting in trouble for downloading it illegally. If magically somehow tomorrow every illegal download came with a bill for 250$ for each infraction at the end of the month things would change and more people would move bac…

The myth is always that either one illegally downloads or pays for it through channels. However, most people I know will pay for some content and not others. It's a question of value. Just because the illegal download costs $250 does not imply that people will pay $10 or $20 instead. The third (and oft-ignored) option is that they will simply find other content that is worth the expense (both monetary and effort).
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