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A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.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 30m kronor (£2.4m) in damages.
In a Twitter posting, Mr Sunde said: "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media."
[online.wsj.com...]
Judge Norstrom acknowledged to Swedish Radio that he was a member of The Swedish Association for Copyright, as well as a board member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. He also said he has worked alongside Monica Wadsted -- who represented the American movie industry in the trial -- to solve disputes related to Internet domain names. However, he rejected that there was any conflict of interests
Nah, no conflict there at all.
>It seems to be a disingenuous argument to say "orphaned
>works and deteriorating film shows copyright has flaws.
>Thus, copyright should be thrown out, and I should be able
>to download music"
I don't see anyone making that point. It's more about "look, it's obviously flawed, it should be changed to fit reality". It's not "kill it with fire", allthough some might prefer that. Copyright is great for pure commercial use, it's becoming a problem for culture, though. I've read quite a few articles about artists being sued for copyright-infringement because they sampled a few seconds from an old song for their new song. There was this hoax a few years back, claiming metallica (or somebody else) had patented some guitar chords and was suing people who used it. Got media coverage then because the idea was so bizarre and it was made pretty good looking. I don't see how it's that bizarre today.
In germany, the Deutsche Telekom tried to bully companies of the color "magenta", claiming it was their's alone. didn't work a few years ago. might work soon enough.
I don't have a clue about Swedish law, but could that not be a mis-trial?
@jan
Not overtly, but that seems to be the thrust. People are using orphaned works as an example of how copyright is flawed, and trying to equate that with Music Theft being acceptable.
I'm all for copying for preservation (kept for posterity, not granting reuse)
I'm happy to have a discussion about REUSE of orphaned works under some sort of frame work, including due dilligence
I am not willing to entertain any notion that such a discussion should be grafted on to a disussion about TPB. Its not the same discussion, and as such should not be part of this thread. The fact that it is shows that people are trying to equate the two.
[edited by: Shaddows at 8:43 am (utc) on April 24, 2009]
I'm all for copying for preservation (kept for posterity, not granting reuse)
You wouldn't be so keen on preservation if you knew lawyers were using archives.org and other preservation sites to build cases, preservation should be OPT-IN only just to protect yourself.
