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Sweden to Give Courts New Power to Hunt IP Infringers
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 15, 2008 08:28 PM
from the unleash-the-p2p-sniffing-hounds dept.
from the unleash-the-p2p-sniffing-hounds dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Swedish Culture & Justice ministers are preparing to give new power to Swedish courts to let them force ISPs to give up subscriber IPs. The end goal is trying subscribers in court for copyright infringement. As the one-time home of the Pirate Bay, which is now internationally distributed, they face both US pressure and push-back at home. The Swedish arm of the Pirate Party is calling this move a 'sanctioned blackmailing operation', but hopefully the Swedish courts won't allow the IFPI to use as many tricks as the RIAA has in US courts."
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Legalize File Sharing, Say Swedish MPs 545 comments
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Your Rights Online: Four Indicted in Pirate Bay Case 709 comments
paulraps writes "Suddenly the founders of the Pirate Bay are not so hearty. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site were indicted in Sweden on Thursday on charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law. And this is more than just a shot across the bows. The prosecutor reckons that they can be hooked for 'promoting other people's copyright breaches' but there will be no walking the plank: instead, they face fines of up to $200,000 and the confiscation of all their hardware. 'The Swedish prosecutor listed dozens of works that had been downloaded through The Pirate Bay site, including The Beatles' Let It Be, Robbie Williams' Intensive Care and the movie Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire. Plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.'"
Submission: Sweden to Give Courts New Power to Hunt Infringers by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Your Rights Online: Wiretapping Bill Passes Swedish Parliament, 143 to 138 326 comments
Assar Bruno Boveri writes "Swedish lawmakers came down in favour of a fiercely debated surveillance bill in a vote at the Riksdag on Wednesday evening. Despite some cosmetic changes, Sweden's proposed surveillance law is still a monster, writes Pär Ström from the independent New Welfare Foundation." The Swedish newspaper DN (in Swedish; translations welcome) compares the implications of the proposed law with activities carried out by East Germany's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (STASI).
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Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:4, Insightful)
How can they call this a legitimate request [cdt.org], given the recent outrages by the companies involved [slashdot.org]?
Shame on Wired for repeating the propaganda phrases, "illegal file sharing" and "piracy". It's not against the law in many countries and sharing should not be considered damaging or wrong anywhere. Giving someone a copy of a book is not the same thing as feeding them to the fish. I'm used to better things from Wired than this.
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As much as you don't lik
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If you share a file for which you have NOT received authorization to do so in the form of a license, you are in fact participating in illegal file sharing.
Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Funny)
Police, please arrest RedK (112790). Thank you.
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Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course there is the right for private copies in some countries, but as some poor RIAA representative put it during Napster's peak: "Ok, it makes a difference wether you share some music with your close friends or thousands of 'friends' over the net."
Just a little sidenote: Many countries have a problem with the sheer flood of indictions coming from *AA lawyers*. I see this as the true reason for legislation to change the rules by either: Giving the copyright holders direct access to the names of those pirating (making it an issue for civil-law), or by introducing a minimum level of damage before the jurisdiction is allowed to act. Of course I prefer the latter, but AFAIK no country had the guts to go this way yet. The UK and France are pretty close with the idea of simply blocking access for those infringing, but I somehow doubt that this will get popular.
*Just a little example from Germany: Over here content creators can't get the name behind an ip-address. So they indict, which leads to the following actions: The state's prosecutor knows it's not worth the hassle, but he has to investigate the identity of the other party - the file will usually be closed after this. The lawyer requests access of records and sends a monition to the person behind the ip-address. In this document he/she offers to drop all civil charges in exchange for a sum which is at a price point significantly lower than anything you would spend in court. For this reason 99% are settled this way, but it's still not a cheap deal for those affected. The problem with this system is that some lawyers send thousands of such requests automatically to one single prosecutor, thereby bringing the legal system to a grinding halt. Therefore legislation has seriously considered to introduce an exemption, below which prosecutors don't act.
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Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:4, Insightful)
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In Canada, for example, it's not: http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/08/22/1655233.shtml [harvard.edu]
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In Canada, for example, it's not: http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/08/22/1655233.shtml [harvard.edu]
Though Canada does require a higher standard of evidence than "here's some plain text log files showing that this IP was making available a file named usher.mp3. We don't have any evidence that this file was by the musician Usher or that this file was uploaded to anyone
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If you share a file for which you have not received authorization to do so in the form of a license, you are in fact participating in illegal file sharing. (...)As much as you don't like it, it's the way it is. Not all file sharing is illegal, but not all of it is legal. Morals have nothing do to with lawfulness of it.
Pirate bay provides links (or trackers) to files, those trackers/links are not copyrighted in any way and there's not law in Sweden that forbids such practice (unlike USA's DMCA). So, In Sweden doing what Pirate Bay does is not illegal AT ALL. No morals, just legality.
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Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, piracy also involves a certain degree of wooden legs and parrots and hoisting "Jolly Roger"'s and broadsides and cutlasses, etc.
How come if you come to my house and I put on a CD you're allowed to hear the music, but GOD FORBID you hear the music by any other means including internet radio which now has to pay god knows how many million dollars for "rights".
The RIAA is about GREED pure and simple. Please provide verifiable documents that prove that ONE SINGLE ARTIST has seen ONE PENNY from the RIAA, who apparently fight in their name. In fact many musical groups ENDORSE "piracy", even in their song lyrics (example Molotov:Yofo; Radiohead, etc), because they are fed up of being ripped off by studios.
Please stop bleating like a sheep and start using your brain. The "cost" of distributing "n" copies of music is now almost ZERO. Why do you insist people still have to pay $15-$20 for a "CD" or $.99 for a "song"? Middlemen add nothing to economies. They are parasites pure and simple.
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Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Insightful)
Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend.
The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company. They make outrageous profit selling CDs for $15 each, but that's not illegal, and as long as people keep buying them for that price, they'll keep doing it.
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Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the market is being distorted by the copyright monopolies. For most kinds of product, a competing vendor could sell cheaper product that is adequately substitutable - due to copyright monopoly law, doing that is classed as "piracy" for some types of information pattern expressed in a physical substrate.
That is _why_ the companies can get away with charging so much money and still stay in business - they've got the government giving them monopolies, usually under some socialistic "help the starving artists" lie.
Personally, I support the abolition of copyright law. They (the copyrightists) have apparently decided to make it a stark choice between communications liberty and enforcement of copyright. If they say "well, we won't release anything if we don't get our copyright monopolies", I say "Fine by me!". Everyone's freedom of communication is simply more important than their monopolies or their ability to make a profit. It's not even all artists that would be hurt - it's that subset of people that are only happy if they get a distribution monopoly. We can simply do without their "art".
Remember, the term "intellectual property" is a debate-framing tactic designed to make you think that copyrights and patents and such are "like" physical property and therefore similarly worthy of protection.
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MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
"Intellectual Property" is a Propaganda term (oh wait, they get offended if you call them propagandists-- they want to be called Public Relations.)
The term "Piracy" is ALSO a manipulative tactic on the act of non-profit copyright infringement. Its such a minor infringement, where as the profit without permission on copy written work is a major infringement and is a core principle for the existence of copyright. Sadly, the "pirates" have embraced the term as part of thei
Copyright is necessary (danger: groupthink error) (Score:5, Insightful)
If musicians were the only people making copyrighted works, then your position might be reasonable. Not all musicians care about copyright, and we can do without the "art" from those who do. But copyright also provides the only way to fund things that are extremely expensive, but also necessary.
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction. The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here; no doubt there are many other examples of very complex programs that are only required by a small number of people. In a world without IP, who will pay for the R&D cost of these programs? Is it reasonable to expect them to be written for free, by free software guys, when there is so little demand for them? Conversely, is it reasonable to expect anyone pay for them if they can be legally pirated? Would your business pay $10k for an essential program if the Pirate Bay would legally give it to you for $0?
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips. The chips will be cheaper because Intel and AMD won't see any profit from them, and the costs won't include the substantial R&D cost of designing the chips in the first place. Intel and AMD would go out of business if this type of piracy was legal. And yet that is exactly the model advocated by the "imaginary property" crowd today: if it's information, then it can't be property.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property. It is not just the MPAA and RIAA who are affected by theft of information; it is every software engineer and everyone else who is trying to make a living by selling information. Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.). The "sell concert tickets", "sell ads", "make it into a service" and "ask for donations" business models just don't apply to every case. Make no mistake, we all need some form of IP law.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I were to burn you a CD, it's perfectly LEGAL here in Canada.
Yo Grark
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Because it's NOT YOUR SONG. Why do you get the right to decide what someone else should charge for their works? Do I get to decide how much you can charge for your labor?
Don't buy it if you don't like the price. But you have ZERO RIGHT to tell the owners of the copyright how much to charge for the use of the copyrighted work.
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I understand the law as written as well. You are a simpleton because you do not ask the rather obvious questions "Why is the law written this way?" and "Is this law right and just?"
No, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Also I would say the argument of "Morals have nothing to do with it," is pretty stupid. In the US at least, laws must be just. It isn't simply an abstract concept, it is actually codified in the Constitution. Lower laws must conform to higher level laws, and all laws must be just.
Well it can be quite fairly argued (and indeed is in some RIAA cases) that copyright law is unjust. It has two major constitutional problems:
1) The whole reason Congress is allowed to make copyright law is the Constitution grants it. One of the lines in Article I Section 8 reads "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Ok, great, however like most of the powers granted in the Constitution to the government, there are limits. It doesn't say Congress has the right to do whatever they want with regards to IP. It says that they may secure an exclusive right for a LIMITED amount of time, and the reason they may do so is to promote the progress of science and art.
Ok well it seems current copyright law runs afoul of both. For one, I don't think that "Life plus 70 years," which is the current US copyright length, is what is meant by "limited time." It seems that is far too long. Then there is the fact that the whole reason is to promote science and art, where it seems that the currently lengthy copyrights are used to suppress it. Companies hold on to copyrights, refusing to release the work or allow derivatives. For example companies go after sites distributing copies of old console games, despite the fact that the companies themselves have long since stopped selling those games and indeed refuse to do so anymore. They just sit on the copyright, and stand in the way of using it for any progress.
2) All punishments must be fair, as per Amendment 8 which reads "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." In the case of copyright infringement, the part we are interested is "nor excessive fines imposed." The statutory damages seem to run afoul of that. $150,000 per incident of statutory damages? Are you kidding me? It is quite literally more than you'd get had you physically stolen media containing a copy of the work.
So it seems that the current situation may well be unjust, immoral, and thus it certainly DOES matter. I hate this idea of "The law is the law." Ya well, guess what? The law can and should be changed. It was the law at one time that you could own slaves, certain humans were seen as worth less. That was actually right in the Constitution. That doesn't mean it was right. It is silly to simply point to a bad law and say "Well that's the law so there."
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Re:No, actually (Score:4, Informative)
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3. The unauthorized and illegal reproduction or distribution of materials protected by copyright, patent, or trademark law. See INFRINGEMENT.
"[T]he test of piracy [is] not whether the identical language, the same words, are used, but whether the substance of the production is unlawfully appropriated." Eaton S. Drone, A Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions 97 (1879).
Black's Law Dictionary (2004)(citation abridged)
Corporations are not people (Score:2)
Corporations are not citizens and they are not human. Allowing them citizen status (which they have) lets them have many of our rights but without the draw backs of being human. It leads to many problems.
Take away corporate ownership of "IP" rights. At least then they can't lay off influential creators/inventors before retirement to save money -- with that line "What have you done for us lately?" How
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Another option is to abolish all rights for corporations and require that either a declared individual in the corporation represents the company for all rights and penalties, or that corporations are merely collections of individuals and that the individuals hav
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In the US at least, laws must be just. It isn't simply an abstract concept, it is actually codified in the Constitution. Lower laws must conform to higher level laws, and all laws must be just.
In a sci fi book I'm reading, a police AI observes that the purpose of law is to create order and that justice is incidental.
I'd be willing to argue, for at least certain groups/types of laws, that justice is relative depending on your perspective.
For example, I'm sure abolitionists saw what they were doing as "just".
2) All punishments must be fair, as per Amendment 8 which reads "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
!excessive != fair
Punishments can obviously be unfair without being excessive.
See: Punishment for possession of crack cocaine [wikipedia.org]
I think that's excessive and unfair, but the Supreme Court has yet
This use of the word piracy is not recent (Score:5, Informative)
For an example, see Blunt v. Patten, 2 Paine 397, 3 F.Cas. 763 (1828):
. . .
The act that secures copyright to authors, guards against the piracy of the words and sentiments; but it does not prohibit writing on the same subject. As in the case of histories and dictionaries.
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You can sugar coat it all you want, if you are unauthorized to redistribute content, and you are doing it, what you are doing is Piracy.
Mod -100 lies lies and more lies.
Quote me one nations laws that back up what you just said. You can't, because that is not what ANY nations piracy laws state. Also no nations copyright laws will mention the word piracy.
Sugar coat it all you want, but you are just spreading lies and more lies
The only document I can even find that links copyright and piracy is the Cathach of St. Columba, a seventh century book of psalms. No nation abides by this document as law anymore.
In case you didn't notice, we are in
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All our problems would be resolved.
~Dan
Re:Illegal files? Illegitimate Requests! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Sparkle and Fade (Score:3, Interesting)
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The second rule of fightclub is...
Big 4 Music Companies Sparkle and Fade (Score:2)
The record of dissaster you quote is also endless resurgence. The 4 big music companies on the other hand have been crapping out 15% every year. File sharing and the rise of independent music producers are linked by more than temporal coincidence.
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Shhhhhhhh. IRC is nothing more than a series of chat rooms :)
If by "series of chat rooms" you mean, "seedy underbelly of the internet". You would be correct sir, although I've heard places like DALnet aren't populated with such, ahem, extreme content these days.
Offtopic I know, but I've always wonder why the recording cartels and law enforcement didn't go after IRC with much publicity. It's not that under the radar, Dateline was using what appeared to be mIRC when they were buying credit card numbers in one of their under cover stories.
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Pirate Bay IS NOT A P2P System! They provide trackers to P2P networks
Exactly it's part of a larger whole that enables the peer 2 peer transfer of files, a system [wikipedia.org] , if you will.
And as far as I'm concerned IRC and FTP have nothing to do with P2P.
They do in the fact, atleast if we're talking about the broader, sharing of copyrighted works. Which is one of the very reasons p2p is such a hot topic these days.
Pirate Bay is law abiding! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pirate Bay is law abiding! (Score:5, Informative)
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From TFA: (Score:5, Interesting)
Sweden Pursues Illegal File-Sharers
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., MGM Pictures Inc., Colombia Pictures Industries Inc., 20th Century Fox Films Co., Sony BMG, Universal and EMI have until Feb. 29 to file claims for damages in the case.
So, is that Feb 29 of this year, or in the next leap year, or is this article HOPELESSLY OUT OF DATE? Did they file it or not?
IP address and legal privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
One interesting side effect... (Score:2, Interesting)
The ministers writes
"Today copyright holders are by and large bound to report internet copyright violations to the police. The Police and attorneys work has admittedly improved through enhanced education and specialisation but its not reasonable that this whole responsibility should be placed on police and attornies alone.
On the contrary it is in many cases more naturally and suitable that
Question (Score:2)
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The infringer is a target because he is downloading - and redistributing - files that aren't being offered for free. Perhaps because the master file cost $100 million dollars and the labor of 400 people to produce.
I actually like this law (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have admissible evidence that someone is committing a crime, such as copyright infringement, I see no reason you cannot go to a judge, get a warrant, and get the IP address of the culprits. I see no reason that you cannot take the evidence for any number of such crimes, and go to a judge, and get a warrant to get the IP addresses of all of the culprits. The problem with the RIAA is that they really don't do that. They taken blanket unsubstatiated information and then go directly to the ISP/school/whatever. However, given a reasonable due process, this is quite reasonable.
And this really doesn't impact The Pirate Bay. If The Pirate Bay hosts torrents, and those torrents lead to people who are illegally copying files, then I see no reason that the copyright holder's ability to get that IP address has anything to do with the person hosting the files or the torrents. Either way, they are not liable any more than a bank is liable if someone puts drugs into their safe deposit box. No more than if someone agrees to a drug deal while drinking coffee at your restaurant.
Re:lol (Score:4, Interesting)
Its a lot easier to deny a random search/download on something like the ed2k network as you don't know what you are getting until its there.. With the torrent from a well documented place like PB, its pretty much clear what you were doing.
What needs to be done is complete plausible deniability, like is offered on FreeNet with its encrypted local store and communications, but with some sort of multi-homed downloads so it doesn't take months to get a file. ( of course that doesn't help you if you have CDs full of the stuff for backup and you get raided. )
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Re:lol (Score:4, Insightful)
The purists are just reinforcing the first point, and telling the pirates that the correct action for them to take is not point 1, but to deal with point 2 instead.
The pirates are using the reality that the industry and government are rigged such that it's not possible to fix point 2, to justify point 1.
I believe that most people that consider this situation will come to the same conclusion. You should not break the law even if the law is unjust, so long as you have the mechanism to get the law fixed. Once those efforts ("the system") fails to work in the favor of justice and fairness, then you have at least some moral standing to break the unjust law.
it's a bit like rebellion. Most people agree that trying to try to overthrow your government is a bad idea, so long as you the people have the ability to affect change. Once you have come to the conclusion that you cannot fix what is broken, it's time for revolution. Read the preamble to the constitution.
The same thing is happening here with copyright that happened every time there was a revolt in the past. People are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore." And most sensible people can stand back and observe the situation, and agree that yes, they are breaking the law, and yes there is some justification to their actions.
Tightening the laws and controls never fixes these sorts of problems. (you cannot fix the problem by addressing point 1) As long as a significant injustice remains, there will always be a faction fighting for change. (you must address point 2) The examples are too numerous to mention, and exceptions all but nonexistent.
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