Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Thu 25th Jun 2009 16:40 UTC
Back in April after the four involved in the Pirate Bay scuffle were declared guilty of helping to break copyright law, the judge who gave the verdict, Thomas Norstrom, was found to probably be biased due to his involvement in several pro-copyright groups. After a long, cold, hard bout of deliberation, the Swedish Court of Appeals has actually found Norstrom unbiased, something rather surprising. This means that the charges against the guilty still stand.
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Member since:
2006-01-02
Some facts:
* original copyright duration (when it was about encouraging creativity) was 15 years. Now it's 95 years in many countries.
* of course this legislation was literally paid for by media industrials (in the USA, where this form of corruption is called "lobbying", it is not even illegal and occurred all in the open).
* when law isn't legitimate anymore (as in, generated by a democratic process), it isn't morally bad to breach it. Actually, if law gets bad enough, it can be morally bad to obey it. Think of <enter your favorite dictatorship here>. If you can't accept that it's sometimes OK, even required, to breach the law, then you have never lived under a dictatorship.
What did the Pirate Bay do? They encouraged other people to break the law. Was it illegal? Perhaps, but that shouldn't matter to us, since that was just a purchased law, not a law originating in the democratic process. So regardless of whether that was illegal, that certainly wasn't morally wrong.
I regret just as much as you that copyright law was ridiculed to that extent, but it's not me or the Pirate Bay who's to blame, it's the lawmakers and ... their customers the media industrials.
What is REALLY wrong is to see people here siding with the judge and media industry. Do you always, out of habit, side with whomever looks stronger?
Edited 2009-06-25 22:39 UTC