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Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders (Read 4190 times)

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Bled

#1 April 17, 2009, 01:29:36 pm

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Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.

Speaking at an online press conference, he described the verdict as "bizarre.

"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. And that's a bit weird," Sunde said.

"It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

"We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."

It is almost certain that The Pirate Bay will keep on sailing, long after today's court judgement
Read more at the dot.life blog
Q&A: Pirate Bay verdict

The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.

However, the total awarded fell short of the $17.5m in damages and interest the firms were seeking.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

"These guys weren't making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

"The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn't even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.

"There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," he said.
Pirate Bay"s first server
The Pirate Bay's first server is now a museum exhibit in Stockholm

The four men denied the charges throughout the trial, saying that because they did not actually host any files, they were not doing anything wrong.

A lawyer for Carl Lundstrom, Per Samuelson told journalists he was shocked by the guilty verdict and the severity of the sentence.

"That's outrageous, in my point of view. Of course we will appeal," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. "This is the first word, not the last. The last word will be ours."

Political issue

Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party - which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age - told the BBC that the verdict was "a gross injustice".

"This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.

Mark Mulligan from Forrester Research says what was different about Pirate Bay

"There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can't encourage people to break copyright law, I'm not following it and I don't agree with it.

"Today's events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we're going to take this to the European Parliament."

The Pirate Bay is the world's most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead the site hosts "torrent" links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers.

Fucking crazy.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
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Jayce

#2 April 17, 2009, 01:41:24 pm

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DAMN I was just about to make this

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jamie

#3 April 17, 2009, 01:47:31 pm

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Quote

"It's serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It's really serious. And that's a bit weird," Sunde said.

"It's so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it's even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

"We can't pay and we wouldn't pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."

I like this bit.

So, I know nothing about piracy law or anything like that. Anything I've got to say about it is just hot air. I disagree with the verdict and I hope these guys get out of any jail time primarily and I think the damages claim is really gross because fuck big business always. Poor guys.

I like The Pirate Bay, I don't usually find dead torrent on it. It's a good site. It's a quality site.

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BlackRaven

#4 April 17, 2009, 01:48:44 pm

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They'll appeal, so while the battle has been lost, the war is far from over.

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Carrion Crow

#5 April 17, 2009, 01:49:50 pm

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Quote from: John Kennedy

"These guys weren't making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

Hypocrite much? £17 for a metallica CD in HMV where I live. Nothing special, just the plastic in a normal plastic jewel case. For that you could get broadband for a month.

This is how it should be done, John Kennedy of the IFPI, this is how it should be done: http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup

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Artis Leon Ivey Jr

#6 April 17, 2009, 01:58:16 pm

Insane teacher
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from what I know of piracy stuff, the courts haven't caught up to torrent sites since they don't directly link anything, and you can't get rid of FTPs etc as you know COLLAPSE OF EVERY SOFTWARE COMPANY. so this is not unexpected at all but it's probably going to set up lots of crazy legal precedences!

brian chemicals

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Carrion Crow

#7 April 17, 2009, 02:02:43 pm

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Todays news isn't all bad: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8000556.stm

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Shadow Kirby

#8 April 17, 2009, 03:02:20 pm

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Between that and the pirates that got killed earlier this month, those are bad times for pirates.

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Vellfire

#9 April 17, 2009, 03:21:41 pm

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About the line-their-own-pockets comment, do they actually MAKE money from The Pirate Bay or does it all just go to paying for the site? Because there's a HUGE difference in that.

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Alec

#10 April 17, 2009, 03:30:30 pm

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I would assume a very large amount goes to internet service electricity and office/server space leasing

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Evangel

#11 April 17, 2009, 03:41:37 pm

brown priyde yea mayne
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So what if they did make a little bit of money on the side? It's not like they charged for anything. It sucks that the court of law all around the world regularly misunderstands the technology they're judging.

keep posting...

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Vellfire

#12 April 17, 2009, 03:42:38 pm

TV people want to leave
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Because it's a lot easier to defend this type of thing when you're not profiting from it.

I love this hobby - stealing your mother's diary
BRRING! BRRING!
Hello! It's me, Vellfire! FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER! ... Bye! CLICK! @gidgetnomates

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Farren

#13 April 17, 2009, 05:24:33 pm

I fear and I tremble
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I don't see putting as much time as it would take to run one of these servers without getting something in return. I mean kudos to them if they did it without compensation but I don't blame them for pocketing a little of it to pay bills.

DEUCE: MEETING THE URINE UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL AND REALIZING IT'S JUST LIKE ME AND MY PREJUDICES THIS WHOLE TIME WERE COMPLETELY FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF PTTTTHTHTHH GOD IT'S EVERYWHERE<br />DEUCE: FUCK THIS TASTES LIKE PISS<br />PANTS: WHERE IT SHOULD TASTE LIKE COTTON CANDY OR PICKLES<br />DEUCE: OR AT LEAST LIKE URINE NOT PISS

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Vellfire

#14 April 17, 2009, 05:47:45 pm

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I never said I blamed them, but it looks a lot worse when you're trying to defend what you're doing if you're making money through some sort of piracy (whether it's legal or not) than if you don't profit from it. It's not BAD it just won't help them against people that think like these people they're up against.

I love this hobby - stealing your mother's diary
BRRING! BRRING!
Hello! It's me, Vellfire! FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER! ... Bye! CLICK! @gidgetnomates

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dada

#15 April 17, 2009, 06:19:49 pm

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I really have no idea how they could have been found guilty. With currently existing technology it's impossible to tell with 100% certainty if a particular torrent file links to a work that is actually protected by the plaintiff. It's legally highly dubious whether possession of a useless, encrypted segment of a protected work is equal to possession of the complete work.

And, of course, the most compelling evidence of all: The Pirate Bay is really just like Google. They're both search engines differing only in what they search for. (The Pirate Bay only points you to torrent files, all of which are legal without exception, whereas Google can give you anything from MP3s to YouTube versions of entire movies.)

Technically, they weren't even linking to illegal material. They were linking to perfectly legal torrent files which linked to the people who have the material, who then, on their own, made a P2P connection to send the files. Shouldn't that mean, at best, that torrent files are illegal, rather than the sites that contain them? If The Pirate Bay is guilty, that means anything that arbitrarily helped this process should be illegal too. Including the torrent program, the web server the site was running on, the TCP/IP layer in the operating system used to send the packets, and the network cards and cables. All of these things "help" to make the process possible.

I think the judge must have decided on the guilty verdict because they call themselves "pirates", even though there's nothing illegal about calling yourself anything.

Quote from: Evangel on April 17, 2009, 03:41:37 pm

So what if they did make a little bit of money on the side? It's not like they charged for anything. It sucks that the court of law all around the world regularly misunderstands the technology they're judging.

With the gigantic server park they need to survive the daily search and torrent download requests, I'd say it's not very likely they are making any kind of profit. I don't know exactly how they get the funds to purchase and replace their equipment, but the site's advertisements would probably only barely keep them in the black.

I mean, really, they're not going to be able to pay this bill. They don't have any money!

Last Edit: April 17, 2009, 06:23:17 pm by Dada

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dada

#16 April 17, 2009, 06:21:35 pm

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Quote from: Velfarre on April 17, 2009, 05:47:45 pm

I never said I blamed them, but it looks a lot worse when you're trying to defend what you're doing if you're making money through some sort of piracy (whether it's legal or not) than if you don't profit from it.

It shouldn't. Just like calling yourself a "pirate" doesn't incriminate you when all you are doing is running a perfectly legal and profitable business, such as a website that has revenue from its visitors clicking on the advertisements. Making money isn't illegal. It might make them look bad, but that's why justice is blind.

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Ghost_Aspergers

#17 April 17, 2009, 06:22:32 pm

The man in the woods.
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Remember when the TV links guy got arrested?

Well now I am seeing commercials for Hulu.

Fuck the RIAA/MPAA (even though the TV links and the PB cases happened in Britain and Sweden respectively)

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Ragnar

#18 April 17, 2009, 06:57:07 pm

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yeah despite all this isn't 99% of Youtube's profits from like getting songs/music videos/tv shows/movies/anime for free and they just put up some emo fags to make it look like a legitimate business

http://djsaint-hubert.bandcamp.com/

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SupremeWarrior

#19 April 17, 2009, 08:52:51 pm

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So, wait a minute they are actually going to have to face jail time? That's absurd, I mean unless you don't know what a torrent or a torrent site is then this is complete bollocks.

EDIT: I was just on Pirate Bay and I guess it's a bit weird but why is it still up?

Last Edit: April 17, 2009, 09:03:17 pm by SupremeWarrior

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BlackRaven

#20 April 17, 2009, 09:06:34 pm

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It's not over yet, as they'll just take it to a higher court. Hell, the other side would've taken it to a higher court if they'd been acquitted. So this really doesn't mean anything.

EDIT: Also, Pirate Bay is still up because they moved it abroad when the police took their old server a year ago.

Last Edit: April 17, 2009, 09:14:10 pm by BlackRaven

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