Prosecutors Drop Half The Charges Against The Pirate Bay
from the research-anyone? dept
We avoided reporting on The Pirate Bay trial yesterday because not much of interest actually happened. It was (as The Pirate Bay folks intended) more of a spectacle than anything interesting. However, this morning, the prosecutors dropped half the charges against the defendants, apparently after realizing that The Pirate Bay did not copy any files directly or produce any copyrighted materials for download. While the entertainment industry talking heads are trying to play down the significance of this, it is really rather stunning. Prosecutors have been working on this case (with tremendous assistance from the industry and even foreign government representatives) for well over a year. You would have thought that sometime during that process they would have examined how The Pirate Bay works, and whether or not it actually copies files. It kinda makes you wonder what the prosecution has been doing all this time.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: sweden, trial
Companies: the pirate bay
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it is obvious
The prosecurion and the industry have no idea what they're doing nor how to do it!
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Re: it is obvious
What does email have to do with anything? Are they suggesting TPB emailed infringing files to users?
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Hehe, the bottom line is as someone said above. It doesn't matter. They could take down every public tracker out there, and there would still be every private tracker. I haven't been on a public tracker in 3 years, the quality and speed sucks.
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Go back to 95
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Re: Go back to 95
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Gotta love the spin they're putting on the announcement....."we're just simplifying the case and it changes nothing"......lol.
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The second part of the charges, making the material available, may be a little harder to defend against. I don't know how the law is in Sweden, but I'm still putting my bets on the Pirate Bay.
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Not sanquin
I am somewhat relieved to see that, after all this time, the prosecutors still have no clue about how any of this stuff actually works. I am worried, though, that the judge(s?) willl be equally clueless.
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Re: Not sanquin
What is that? Two layers of indirection? That's stretching credulity.
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Re: Not sanquin
Under this logic, they would also have to prosecute the public library right. :-)
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So what are the other charges remaining?
Such stupidity.
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Re: So what are the other charges remaining?
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Re: Re: So what are the other charges remaining?
They have no evidence of anything. This is not a slow prosecution to go from small things to big things. This is a giant and worldwide publicized trial that probably bigger heads of governments than we can imagine not only have a hand in moving the prosecution to trial, but also in watching how this trial plays out. I can guarantee you every torrent tracker in the US is going to be watching very carefully how this plays out and the rest of Europe too.
Just wait for the courts to claim the word Piracy. You'll see the pirate bay explode about how inaccurate that is.
Or have you not noticed that this is about copyright, and not "piracy". Once the prosecution mentions piracy they'll have lost any and all credibility.
Also, they haven't gotten to piratebay's counterclaims. When those come, this will be fun.
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Defence starts on Thursday I believe.
To clarify what has happened, the prosecutor has dropped charges of "assisting copyright infringement", the remaining charges are "assisting making available".
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Re: Re: So what are the other charges remaining?
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As I said before...
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Simply put, meaningless. The quantity of copy infringed material will simply continue to increase unabated with or with TPB.
Asking around my office recently, there was not a single person I spoke to who did not utilise torrents. This is coming from a completely non-tech office where 99% of my fail to distinguish between "reply" and "reply all" when responding to email.
File sharing is mainstream now, with your mum/dad/aunts/uncles/colleagues/kids/friends doing it. Trying to stop that is like trying to stop people breathing air.
Good luck.
PS. Who even uses torrents these days? They're so slow....
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Re: Re: Re: Re: As I said before...
also, if you think torrents are slow then you don't know how to use them properly
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Duh
Isn't it obvious? They've been torrenting their lawbooks.
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Watch my left hand
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I think the article and your blog post is a bit off mark. The prosecutor gave an explanation of the bittorrent protocol to the court so I'm sure that he realizes that the PB persons don't directly engage in copyright infringement through their site. I think what made him drop these charges was rather that he realized that it would be very difficult to prove, using the documentation at his disposal, that the Pirate Bay tracker was actually used in the concrete file sharing cases brought up. He admitted himself that he wasn't familiar with the tracker-less DHT mode of bittorrent clients. Furthermore, it's possible that he didn't know that a torrent file can refer to multiple trackers. And finally, quite surprisingly, he doesn't have a copy of the torrent files (or he has, but for some reason has nothing to gain from presenting them). I believe it's these three things taken together which motivated his decision to drop these charges.
Nathan wrote: "I could be wrong here, but wasn't that raid deemed illegal. If so, wouldn't any evidence obtained as a result of that raid be inadmissible."
Actually, you are wrong. According to Swedish law it's possible to present almost any kind of evidence (some exceptions include classified lawyer and medical records) even if it was obtained in an illegal manner. Being as we are greatly influenced by american movies I think the average Swede would be just as surprised as you probably are to learn this.
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I wonder..
How many (less knowledgeable) people who would have just used limewire (oe) have now found out about torrenting?
How much this case, against TPB has increased world piracy?
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According to newsy.com, the companies are only asking about $13.6 million in reparation. Does this number seem low to anyone?
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and while they keep making money all those millions of potential sales go up in smoke.
i dont really give a crap about the music or movie industires but the games industry really gets hit by thier site and similar ones.
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The Simple Answer Is Probably The Most Correct Answer
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Anonymous Coward said: "Can you combine Civil and Criminal charges in Sweden? It seem wrong that they are facing both civil damages to the entertainment industry and jail time."
Some of the PB persons and their lawyers insisted that the two types of charges should be separated, but the court didn't agree to that. This matter is also mentioned in this Wired blog post where a Swedish tort law professor criticises the choice of handling both criminal and civil charges in the same trial. See also: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/prosecution-dro.html
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