• The Pirate Bay: Jail-time is Stupid

    The Pirate Bay: Jail-time is Stupid

    Techtree News Staff, Apr 18, 2009 2004 hrs IST

    The 4 defendants have been sentenced to a year in prison

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It may seem to be carnival time for copyright holders as the 4 Vikings of the file-sharing service, The Pirate Bay (TPB), have been found guilty for violating copyright law. Even as the verdict comes after a 9-day trial, this may not be the final one as it's just the first round done; more play coming up!

A Swedish court on Friday found defendants - Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neil, and Carl Lundstrom - guilty in The Pirate Bay case, and sentenced each to a year in jail. They will also need to shell out 30 million Swedish Kronors (approximately Rs. 1,80,00,000).

The defendants have appealed and are hopeful to get away with the allegations against them.

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is a notoriously famous BitTorrent (.torrent) file tracker website meant to search for torrent files (of music, videos, and games). The website does not store any of this actual content on the website, but works as a platform for search and sharing of torrent files, usually illegal, using the BitTorrent technology - which is legal.

The Case

The defendants of Piratebay.org claim that it is no different from regular search engines, whereas copyright holders accuse it of being the most popular font of copyright infringement around.

The Aftermath


 


In a 25-minute long video press conference on Bambuser, Peter Sunde is asked about what will happen now and when will he go behind bars. He responds saying, "I don't think that's going to happen. The higher up you go in Swedish court system, the fairer judgment you'll get - and no one can say that this is a fair judgment."

"Even if it would be illegal - which we really claim that it's not, and we have read the laws in this then we have the top lawyers in Sweden and they can't understand that this is a crime either. So, even it was a crime, jail-time is so stupid. Because when it comes to copyright issues, it's a civil complaint; we can't really get jail-time for a civil complaint."


 


Watch the complete 25-minute video below:





 


Facebook



A group hosted by Sweden's Pirate Party (read about it below) called for "Demonstration against the ruling of the Pirate Bay trial - Following TPB ruling so we meet up and demonstrate for the rights of the shared culture!" through Facebook to agglomerate people against the ruling. This event took place today, on Apr 18, 2009 at Medborgarplatsen, Stockholm.


 


Jonas Rudberg write's (translated from Swedish) on the same page: "Participated in the demonstration in Stockholm as well drew around 500 people (or more?) But I thought it was pretty poorly organized. I am not myself a member, but sympathetic to a large extent on the substance. If the PP (Pirate Party) will have a chance to be elected to any parliament, they must be better at organizing meetings and preparing speeches better."



Pirat Partiet (The Pirate Party)

The Pirate Party, a political party in Sweden, strives to reform laws regarding copyright and patents. Apparently, the Pirate Party developed on a completely parallel track and is unrelated to the The Pirate Bay.


 


Till the day of the trial, it had as many as 14,500 members as on April 2009. However, party's leader Rickard Falkvinge's website shows a rapid escalation in the members number to over 16, 500 on Friday alone.


Last Comment



M. Larsson, an avid Pirate Bay user from Stockholm wrote to Techtree, "Personally, I think that both the ruling and the penalties are absurd. If reality does not conform with the map, it is the map that is wrong - not the reality. And when human rights view is not consistent with the law, so must our legislators take seriously reflect on whether they really want to dissolve the people and form a new."


Here's what The Pirate Bay put up on their website after the court's verdict was out:


 

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Discussion Board
Maniacks
,Mangalore, on May 07, 2009 01:01 PM
@True GeekJorhat Either you are too old or you have no idea wat are torrent files ............. they are just a bunch of hash valued and have no copyright content ok....... its just like trying to sue google for displayin a webpage...... and let me tell you a fact if the price of the "SO CALLED COPYRIGHT STUFF" is nomial its ok ... i recently brought an riginal kaspersky antivirus for 3 users for 499 and WAT SMALL TIME ARTISTS you talkin about they harly get any money most of it is taken By recording bosses music artist make more money in live performances and the more ppl listen to their music the more ppl will attend their performances(OF COURSE PPL LIKE YOU I DON THINK LISTEN TO MUSIC) OK SO DONT THINK WER STUPID OK
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William hensley
,White Minnesota USA, on Apr 18, 2009 10:54 PM
a proper response to this travesty brought on by the entertainment industry's desire to dictate our wants to fit their own ideas, should be a world wide boycott of all movie theaters, video shops, music stores. if enough people stop purchasing their products in protest..well they would be begging for mercy
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Matsya
,Stockholm, on Apr 20, 2009 08:37 PM
You miss two important thing here. Pirate Bay is active in Sweden. 1. In Sweden you can borrow free CD, DVD, blu-ray, computer games in libraries. Library is available at all locations and is paid with tax money. 2. In Sweden is not a commercial film industry. Swedish film financed by the Swedish Film Institute.
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Deepak T
,Chennai, on Apr 19, 2009 12:25 PM
Ubuntu ships free along with an Office package, a browser, messengers, email client, photo editing softwares etc. The same time, there is Windows literally asking for an average Indian's one month salary for just the OS & then, MS Office that costs another half a month's salary & the same goes for the browser (at least before the Firefox revolution), photoshop etc. Now, what do you think that explains? Yes, asking money to share your own creations, is not morally wrong. But you've to move with the world. In today's technologically advanced world, there is no point in asking money for each & every thing that can be provided for free. Free torrents are no solution, I'll agree. But torrents are a new technology & a market model should be created for distributing your works through torrents for almost no cost. Find a way to change with the world, not against it..
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True Geek
,Jorhat, Assam, on Apr 19, 2009 04:58 PM
I would agree with you that hypothetically bit torrent sites can be used as legal media marketing networks. But the problem lies in the fact that such sites are abundant in torrents which are nothing but pirated copies of genuine work. So a visitor to that site would hardly be interested in a paid copy of some content when he can easily download the same for free. So probably a total cleansing of the entire torrent concept needs to be done before any such business model can be put to practice. Secondly, content creators and programmers spend 100s if not 1000s of hours developing their work. So they obviously deserve some pay in return for that. But still, the pricing policy of software giants in India is beyond me. I don't think we would ever be able to eradicate piracy completely from India unless there is a drastic change in the software pricing system.
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True Geek
,Jorhat, Assam, on Apr 19, 2009 10:05 AM
Techtree seems to be gregariously inclined towards considering the act of illegal file sharing a just and legal one. And its saddening that such sentiments are shared by a lot of Indians. No doubt they didn't host the files in their own servers but everyone knows that file sharing sites are nothing but an haven for pirated software and multimedia distribution and such acts shouldn't be condoned at any level. I would request techtree to not just raise the voice of the pirates but also of those artists and small time software developers who strife constantly against the menace called piracy.
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