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:2007-07-13
Just wait until the secret ACTA treaty comes into force and then see the idiots defend it. Even though it is designed to bolster the outmoded business practices of corporations at the expense of the people and small innovative companies.
The morphing of copyright law (and patent law in many countries) is socially immoral. However, it is also immoral to download copyrighted content, so you have to refrain from that as well if you are to debate morality. Either don't get it or pay for the content (although you strengthen the corporations doing this).
I sympathise with the poster whose software is being pirated, but it isn't the Pirate Bays fault. They merely have a search service with cheeky branding (which should not be a crime in any country) and are no less culpable than Google or Microsoft (OMG, Microsoft develops software that hosts most malware and is used in the vast majority of case when copyrighted material is downloaded). See how ridiculous the argument is?
The Pirate Bay has been condemned based on their branding (which has been taken as intent, even though they did not say copyrighted material was explicitly allowed), not the fact they don't actually host illegal content themselves. That is not justice. Same as saying, "oh, it's ok to convict the scruffy unemployed but we'll let white collar criminals off because they didn't actually 'hurt' anyone (bulls!t, think of all the pensioners whose life saving are always affected)".
As the earlier poster said (+1 Insightful), it is the users of Pirate Bay who are committing the actual crime. They are the ones who register and download torrents.
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