The Pirate Bay Trial Day 10: Calls for Jail Time

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-day-10-calls-for-jail-time-090302/

by adnymarc • 17 years ago

43 57 17 years ago

ErrantX13• 17 years ago

They are almost sure to get nailed for it now I think - and a good thing too.

Neither side winning is a good outcome for the rest of us but I prefer to see the idiots dealt some of their own punishment for once ;D

josefresco• 17 years ago

Agreed, you're talking about the Movie Companies/IFPI getting nailed right?

randallsquared5• 17 years ago

Actually, I'd argue that TPB winning would be a good outcome for the rest of us, but even if they don't, it's only a matter of time. Patterns are not things, and the only way to paper over the difference is to make it harder to work with patterns... but that's not the way technology is going.

ErrantX13• 17 years ago

I dont buy that. Please explain why that would be good?

If the music companies win then perhaps the idiot pirates start to acutally get scared. Then us sensible lot can sit down with the companies and get them to do things right. Stuff is moving in the right direction (Apple going non-DRM for instance) these guys are dinosaurs and holding things back. Send em down.

I fail to see how anyone can condone TPB ever.... they damage the file sharing community like nothing else before.

(ps am amused at the downmodding of my comment.... way to support piracy.. ;))

sfk• 17 years ago

I disagree. Should the pirate bay win, politicians can argue that current laws aren't strong enough to prevent illegal activities on the Internet. Thus, freedoms that we enjoy nowadays might be taken away in the future.

This is a classic case where the misbehavior of one segment of the population (in this case quite a large segment) could make stricter legislation necessary. I think that real world traffic laws are a good analogy here:

Most people are violating speed limits, and speeding in moderation is socially acceptable. Compare moderate speeding to moderate file sharing, i.e. sharing files with say only 10 of your best acquaintances. Legislation would not be required. However, gross violation of speed limits by a certain group of drivers brought us the traffic police and radar controls. I hope that the gross copyright violations of a certain group of people do not ruin the Internet for everyone.

davidw2• 17 years ago

Here's my bet: they are found guilty for something, don't get jail time or much of a fine, but are required to shut down or modify their operations. If I were a judge, I would see the prosecution's claims as exaggerated, but would probably look askance at the fact that these guys have done nothing at all to remove trackers pointing to copyrighted material, and have actually made fun of those requests.

bep• 17 years ago

Indeed. I guess if they will be force between changing something or move, they will move to another country. So nothing will change anwyay.

ErrantX13• 17 years ago

As far as I knew since the '03 (I think 03) raid their servers are located in a different country anyway.

davidw2• 17 years ago

I think if they're convicted of something, they'll be ordered to stop, and if they flaunt that, then perhaps there will be more serious consequences. That's usually how it works, right? Also, Egypt is not exactly beyond the reach of US influence. Don't know where would be 'safe'... maybe Russia?

mixmax4• 17 years ago

Continually blogging about the courtcase, partying, inviting livebloggers and sending live feeds from the court is an excellent PR strategy for Thepiratebay.

If they're found guilty there'll be an uproar, and the Swedish authorities and judges know they're being watched closely by an international community.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

> the Swedish authorities and judges know they're being watched closely by an international community

Do the Swedish authorities particularly care if a group of people who they consider to be criminals and pirates don't like them? I doubt it.

kaens• 17 years ago

You'd think they would give a little more weight to the group, considering that the users of TPB are a good chunk of the internet-using population of the world.

mixmax4• 17 years ago

They are politicians, and politicians are at the mercy of their voters which happen to consist of a large chunk of filesharers.

When the Pirate Bay's servers were raided a few years ago it turned into a political scandal, and (if I remember correctly) a minister was fired.

Also, The Pirate Party was very close to getting elected into parlaiment at the last election in Sweden.

If I was a Swedish politician or authority I would definitely care.

tlb• 17 years ago

There are even more people sympathetic to pot smokers facing jail time. But authorities don't seem inclined to soften the sentences.

Courts really shouldn't worry about public reaction. That's the job of lawmakers.

chris11• 17 years ago

Could anyone estimate the costs of running The Pirate Bay? I've heard that the site could be grossing millions a year from advertising, but I'm also assuming that the costs are extremely high. I was interested in finding out financial information for the site, but it looks like it won't be released.

lethain• 17 years ago

I imagine it's less than you're suggesting, because they're not serving the files themselves, so their bandwidth would be relatively low compared to a photo or video sharing site.

sam_in_nyc• 17 years ago

Doesn't tracking millions of torrents require a massive amount of bandwidth? I'm no expert on bittorrent protocol, but I'm sure millions of clients pinging "I'm a seeder" or "I'm a leecher" adds up.

amix3• 17 years ago

I think the Pirate Bay is a shady operation. They probably earn millions on giving other peoples work for free. I don't understand the model of "free copying" - if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)?

I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech (especially for movies). And the argument with "trying stuff out", does not really hold - you don't go and try an ice cream for free, you buy it and if it's bad you don't buy ice creams from that store any longer.

latortuga• 17 years ago

> if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo

It isn't really the end user's responsibility to fix a broken business model. I agree with you that it's problematic but trying to infringe upon the public's demand to copy with suing/drm/fear hasn't really done much to stem the tide of copying. And at this point it all just feels like a lack of creativity - charge everyone a yearly subscription fee to a site that allows you to download anything for free at high quality/speeds. That's just one idea off the top of my head; get 30 smart people in a room for a week and I'm sure they could come up with tons of viable alternatives.

cdr• 17 years ago

"Probably earn millions"?

You a) don't seem to be following the case, where the people running it credibly claim to be pretty much broke, b) don't seem to know much about such websites - they're almost universally giant money sinks.

amix3• 17 years ago

Their traffic is the triple of plentyoffish.com and their site is filled with advertising 1). I doubt it's that expensive to run a tracker and especially when they run it in Egypt. I can't really see how they could be broke - they probably state this to not pay taxes and to get people on their side.

1) Check http://i40.tinypic.com/hv77kx.jpg for reference

randallsquared5• 17 years ago

I'm not sure where you live, but here in the US, I can go to most ice cream shops (Marble Slab Creamery, for example) and try various ice creams for free before I buy. ;)

amix3• 17 years ago

You get a taste of ice-cream - it's the equivalent of hearing a snippet of a song or seeing a trailer for a movie. You don't get a full banana split.

seertaak• 17 years ago

So you'd agree to the try-before-buy principle for oh, say, condoms?

There was no obligation to "try-before-buy" policies handed down to sellers of wares by Moses, you know.

I fail to understand how paying for the music that you listen to is a sub-optimal arrangement. All this talk about obsolete business model is just bullshit. If you dig underneath all the "freedom" hyperbole and "fat-cat record companies" self-righteous finger-wagging, what you really have is desire to rationalize behaviour whose analogue in the real world nobody has any difficulty whatsoever to see as stealing.

These self-described pirates deserve nothing less than jail. I say that as a musician who in an ideal world would find record companies that can finance producing or promoting an album, and instead finds a record industry hollowed out by a 50% decline in revenue within a decade. How does the idiotic "expert" professor for the defense explain that figure in the context of massively more pervasive access to music? It just doesn't compute. People are stealing music. Period. We need to stop it, so that the whole ecosystem of jobs related to music (most of these are not fat cats. People like mixing and mastering engineers, session musicians etc) is allowed to flourish. It's currently the case that a lot of the talent in mastering, for example, is being lost. Simply because it's too expensive to have it done by these people now idea. Result: over-compressed albums with totally fake dynamics. I'm an example: I'm a programmer, who would really love to be able to do music. But I don't really want to live on a tour bus the rest of my life. Now, ten years ago, you could go the Steely Dan way and just record studio albums; no touring. That approach simply doesn't work now, and inevitably that means that some real talent is not coming through; the incentives simply aren't there.

weavejester• 17 years ago

Shutting down the Pirate Bay won't stop people copying things. Hollywood need to come up with a better way of distributing movies now, whilst they are in a relatively strong position.

I have 100 times more hard drive space and 400 times the bandwidth than I did a decade ago. In another decade, I'll have 100TB of space and 8Gbps of bandwidth, probably all on my cell phone. Not only does this make movies ridiculously easy to download and store, but all those slow, distributed anonymous P2P networks we have today start to look like feasible way of downloading files.

Hollywood face an enemy of exponentially increasing resilience. They can either attempt to come to an understanding now when they have a good hand, or wait until they have no choice but to bargain from a position of weakness.

abstractbill2• 17 years ago

...if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)? ... I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech...

Really? I hope production costs keep falling as rapidly as they have been. If more people produce great content that doesn't cost millions of dollars to make, we all win.

jibiki• 17 years ago

It's a matter of taste, but I think less money would be good for games and bad for films. Most of the movies I really like were at least somewhat expensive to make.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

> if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)?

Whoever wins this trial, P2P filesharing is unlikely to go away. So I think filesharing will have a number of effects:

Movies and games will get cheaper to produce

People will make less financially ambitious movies and games

Some movies and games will be funded by varients of the Street Performer Protocol -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol

Some movies or games will be funded by the state. Organisations such as the BBC do this today. Possibly there will be a broadband tax to fund the creation of downloadable works, along the lines of this proposal: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...

The Pirate Bay Trial Day 10: Calls for Jail Time

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