Pirate Bay trial

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oh this should be a blast.....
Ars wrote:Pirate Bay trial starts Monday; pirate bus en route

The Pirate Bay goes on trial in Sweden this upcoming Monday, and the site's backers are ready to unleash a media juggernaut of bloggers, Twitterers, and press with the help of a city bus and a live audio stream of the entire trial.
pirate-bus[1].jpg
The Harvard Law students defending accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are doing their best to turn his upcoming trial into a media event, but when it comes to pure spectacle, they have nothing on The Pirate Bay. The Swedish trial against the notorious BitTorrent tracker opens next Monday, and it will come complete with live streamed audio from the courtroom, a Twitter feed, a translation service, and a city bus currently being driven from Belgrade to Stockholm.

The folks on trial are referring to the event as a "spectrial," a combination of "spectacle" and "trial," and there's little doubt it will be. The Pirate Bay backers are on trial for secondary copyright infringement in a case that has been building for several years. The trial begins on February 16 and is slated to go through March 4, with everyone from The Pirate Bay's young backers to the head of the IFPI taking the stand to give evidence. In the middle of it all, on February 20, a "HUGE PARTY" is scheduled.

Public broadcaster SVT will stream audio of the trial, though video recordings from the courtroom are not allowed. The case will (obviously) be held in Swedish, with translation services offered to English-speaking witnesses, but The Pirate Bay wants to make the trial even more accessible to a wider audience. "Of course, this is not enough for us," they write on their new trial-tracking website. "By the help of some friends, we will set up a translated and commentated stream. We will also discuss the trial with famous and/or interesting guests." No word yet on how this will work or how to access it.

The Pirate Bay also hopes to set up a media center outside the courtroom, though with a twist—the center will be a city bus. The bus, called S23K, is currently wending its way through Poland (you can track its progress online), facing various and sundry crises such as gas stations that don't accept euros. In Gdansk, the bus will take a ferry up to northern Sweden, and it is scheduled to arrive in Stockholm before the trial begins. Once there, it will be parked somewhere near the courthouse and "it will be used to intensify the spectacle, among other things functioning as a press center for The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån and as a physical gathering place for sympathisers and curious people."

Somewhat oddly, the HUGE PARTY and the bus trip have both been underwritten by donations. Paying to purchase content is right out, of course, but there's a good list of people willing to pony up for both beer and a Belgrade city bus.

Of course, there's also a big press conference scheduled for Sunday, though The Pirate Bay won't speak to just anybody. Models of upright social behavior themselves, the site's backers can't waste their time with "people who really just can’t behave." They also "do not speak with assholes," and reserve the right to deny press conference access to anyone "just having [a] bad attitude." Clear enough?

With the help of Web streaming, bloggers, Twitter feeds (#spectrial), IRC channels, websites, and one piratical bus, The Pirate Bay is set to fight The Man, but the Swedish establishment and the music business have been preparing for this day for year. Will they at last be able to sink The Pirate Bay?

The founders thumb their noses at the majesty of the law, of course; even if found guilty, they have no plans to shut down The Pirate Bay's global network of servers.
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Re: Pirate Bay trial

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Guardian wrote:Pirate Bay Day 11: trial ends, verdict awaited

Today, the defence lawyers summed up. It was a short trial and not a particularly merry one, but it could have far-reaching effects

Today was the last scheduled in the Pirate Bay trial, and the four defence lawyers made their closing statements. They all presented much the same points, the main ones being that the Pirate Bay site didn't hold any copyright films or music -- it merely acted as a search engine -- and that no copyrighted content passed through it anyway. The prosecution had failed to produce any uploaders or downloaders, and had not shown their actions were illegal where they happened to live.

Fredrik Neij's lawyer, Jonas Nilsson, said that the prosecution had not established that most of the links on the Pirate Bay were to copyright material, but linking to copyright material wasn't specific to Pirate Bay, it was an internet-wide problem.

Then there were the financial issues. The prosecution appears to have an exaggerated view of how much money the site made (millions!), and an even more generous view of how much had been lost in the cases presented in evidence (more millions).

Gottfrid Svartholm's lawyer, Ola Salomonsson, said there were only four adverts on Pirate Bay, not the 64 the prosecution claimed, so the revenue was closer to 725,000 kronor (£55,846, €62,510, $78,655). That was less than the site's running costs of 800,000 kronor.

As for damages of 117 million kronor (£9m, €10.1m, $12.7m), witness Roger Wallis had testified that the content industries benefited from file-sharing. Peter Sunde's lawyer, Peter Althin, said he personal attacks on Wallis were "pathetic". As or Sunde, he was just a spokesman for the site and hadn't done anything illegal.

Carl Lundström's lawyer, Per E Samuelson, said (to quote TorrentFreak's summary) that

when new technology appears it can be difficult to "see the wood for the trees". He said that just because something may have been used by people for illicit purposes, should that mean that there should be an attack on the infrastructure as a result? It's like taking legal action against car manufacturers for the problems experienced on the roads, he said.

As for Lundström, he "didn't own the site, nor was he involved in maintaining or coding it." He was just a "businessman who is only vaguely connected to TPB [via] one of his customers (PRQ)," TorrentFreak reported.

The prosecution didn't enhance its reputation during the case, but as Wired pointed out in an editorial, perhaps the defendants didn't, either. Their previous "swagger evaporated like salt water on a beached schooner once The Pirate Bay landed on the witness stand." Wired said:

In the courtroom, the defendants quickly abandoned their revolutionary, free-culture ideals in favor of the simpler philosophy embraced by criminal defendants since time immemorial: I'm Not Responsible.

Outside the courtroom, "Peter Sunde expressed confidence that The Pirate Bay would win the case," reports Ars Technica. "A guilty verdict would 'be a huge mistake for the future of the Internet,' he said. 'It's quite obvious which side is the good side'."

It's equally obvious to the record industry, of course, which sees sites like Pirate Bay destroying the commercial music business. In its report, Billboard quotes Kjell-Åke Hamrén, chairman of SMFF, the Swedish Music Publishers Association:

"Without compensation the creators' livelihood is unsustainable. It is therefore of utmost importance that licensing schemes and new legal services can emerge in the digital environment, while at the same time legislation says firmly no to grand scale businesses that are built on copyright infringement."

The verdict is due on April 17
follow the link to details synopses of each day. once again the prosecution demonstrates total ignorance.

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darkness wrote:
TC wrote: once again the prosecution demonstrates total ignorance.
The question will be, are the juror's/judge equally as ignorant?
given what was presented to them, the only way they could possibly find is not guilty. in fact, even if the case was presented by the most competent attorneys in the world the jury would still have to find "not guilty". going after people that run these sites is not the way to prosecute, as it is impossible to find against them for these types of charges. offering access to links that use a certain protocol is not illegal, just as gun stores are not illegal. the record companies need a better model. at least the film & TV companies are trying to give people ways to access digital content that will still bring in revenue.

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Throughout the entire trial, I found it amazing that the prosecution had so little knowledge on the subject matter. I thought the point was to read up on everything relating to your case? But as so often in cases involving IT etc, lawmakers have no clue.

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Ars wrote:The Pirate Bay verdict: guilty, with jail time
A Swedish district court has ended The Pirate Bay's "spectrial" with a guilty verdict. The defendants split a 30 million kronor fine and will each spend a year in jail, though one already says he would rather burn all the money he owns than pay up.

The Pirate Bay "spectrial" has ended in a guilty verdict, prison sentences for the defendants, and a shared 30 million kronor ($3.5 million) fine. According to the Swedish district court, the operators of the site were guilty of assisting copyright infringement even though The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question and even though other search engines like Google also provide direct access to illegal .torrent files.

These two points formed the basis of The Pirate Bay's defense, but the court found them ultimately unpersuasive in its 107 page verdict. "By providing a site with, as the district court found, sophisticated search functions, easy upload and storage, and a website linked to the tracker," the defendants were guilty of assistant copyright infringement, the court said.

In an Internet press conference this morning, defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi compared the whole trial to (of all things) The Karate Kid, a movie in which the good guy is roughed up by bullies, goes through a long training process, learns to "wax on, wax off," encounters his bully again in the final round of a karate tournament, and kicks him in the face with his "crane technique." Kolmisoppi sees parallels. In the end, he insists, "we'll kick their ass."

This might seem a strange position coming from someone facing a year in prison, but The Pirate Bay defendants say that this is only the first round in a lengthy process. An appeal will be filed, and the spirited rhetoric will continue. (Speaking of paying the fine, Sunde said that he "would rather burn everything I own and not even give them the dust from the burning" than pay up, even if he had the money to do so.)

The 30 million kronor judgment is reduced from the 117 million kronor fine initially sought by content owners, but it remains a significant sum. The prosecutor insisted throughout the case that the three Pirate Bay admins had grown fat on ad revenues, though the men always denied that the site was anything more than a hobby in which most of the money went to pay hosting and equipment bills.

Fourth defendant Carl Lundström, an heir to the Wasabröd cracker fortune and alleged supporter of right-wing political groups, appears to be good for the money, though his interest in The Pirate Bay was more tangential—he used his telecom company to help the site with hosting and Internet access.

International music trade group IFPI was suitably thrilled by today's news. CEO John Kennedy, who appeared as a witness during the trial, said that the case "was about defending the rights of creators, confirming the illegality of the service and creating a fair environment for legal music services that respect the rights of the creative community. Today’s verdict is the right outcome on all three counts."

The verdict itself was leaked yesterday, with the defendants first learning their fate from a journalist. "Really, it's a bit LOL," Kolmisoppi wrote on Twitter. "It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release."

It was a fitting end to this spectacle of a trial, which opened with The Pirate Bay driving a city bus up from Belgrade to Stockholm, saw the prosecutor dismiss half the charges on the first day, and featured the astonishing claim that 80 percent of the material on the site was legal.

Despite schooling Big Content on public relations throughout the trial, the defendants could not prevail in court. In comments today, Kolmisoppi argues that the whole trial was political in nature, even going so far as to call the district court a "dice court" because its verdicts are so random.

No word yet on the ultimate fate of The Pirate Bay, which at the moment remains active. Read the complete verdict in Swedish.
/. wrote: myvirtualid writes
"The Globe and Mail reports that the Pirate Bay defendants were each sentenced Friday to one year in jail. According to the article, 'Judge Tomas Norstrom told reporters that the court took into account that the site was "commercially driven" when it made the ruling. The defendants have denied any commercial motives behind the site.' The defendants said before the verdict that they would appeal if they were found guilty. 'Stay calm — Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theater for the media,' Mr. Sunde said Friday in a posting on social networking site Twitter."

Update: 04/17 12:16 GMT by T : Several updates, below.
Thanks to all the readers who have sent in various other links related to this news, including the dozens who noted the BBC's version of the story. Reader a_n_d_e_r_s submits a link to the verdict itself (large PDF, in Swedish), and writes "The sentencing is not unexpected (max verdict is 2 years in prison) and the damages is about 1/3 of what the companies that has requested damages had requested. Notice that no punitive damages is applicable." Reader yendor writes, "More details are coming and The Pirate Bay will be holding a press conference at 15.00 CET.

HakanRoswallGoatse points out that besides the jail term imposed (and barring the results of planned appeals), "the four men will have to pay $3,6 million in compensation for lost sales to 17 media companies. Among them are: Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra Entertainment, and Activision."
and of course the industry is pleased:
THR wrote:Swedish file sharers get jail time
Landmark decision to be appealed

The founders of infamous file sharing site The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of assisting copyright theft and been sentenced to prison time in a landmark decision announced in Sweden Friday morning.

The so-called Pirate Bay Four -- Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundstrom -- each received a one-year prison sentence. The court also called on them to pay damages amounting to 30 million Swedish Crowns, or $3.6 million.

The ruling is a major victory for the studios, which were plaintiffs in the case. It is the first time an online site that does not host copyright protected material -- The Pirate Bay only provides links to pirated films, music and television programs hosted on other servers -- has been found guilty of copyright infringement.

The defendants say they will appeal.
gotta say, i'm pretty baffled that a jury came to that conclusion. why aren't people from google in jail? msn? yahoo?

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This verdict shows you EXACTLY how little knowledge the industry has of this new thing called the internet. What a fucking joke of a trial, and a totally absurd verdict. Like TC says, why the fuck aren't the google guys in jail???

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TC wrote: why aren't people from google in jail? msn? yahoo?
Two words: money and lobbiest. They have the kind of cash and clout to stay out of jail. It's a lot easier to go after smaller individuals. And all three of those have financial ties with the studios and vice versa.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: Pirate Bay trial

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darkness wrote:
TC wrote: why aren't people from google in jail? msn? yahoo?
Two words: money and lobbiest. They have the kind of cash and clout to stay out of jail. It's a lot easier to go after smaller individuals. And all three of those have financial ties with the studios and vice versa.
but if you have a jury of "common people" that goes out the window. unless the defense attorney was brainless.

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Forbes wrote:Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay
If the Swedish site shuts down, search engines could become the new starting points for digital pirates.

This week has offered a hard lesson for pirates, both water- and Web-based: Keep a low profile and your illicit business can flourish. But draw too much attention, and you're likely to get sniped.

On Friday, the trial of the Pirate Bay, the Web's highest-profile source of TV shows, movies and music, came to an end when a Swedish court found the administrators of the site guilty of copyright infringement, sentencing them to a year in prison and more than $3 million in fines.

The verdict comes as a surprise to many who assumed the site, which indexes the "tracker" files that allow users to share video and music, was beyond prosecution in its home country of Sweden. And though the sites' owners say they plan to appeal the decision, it may nonetheless lead to the takedown of the Web's most popular index of peer-to-peer downloads.

But even if the Pirate Bay sinks, putting an end to file-sharing isn't so simple. Waiting in the wings to absorb the site's audience are dozens of second-string bittorrent tracker sites that have avoided the Pirate Bay's level of notoriety, including Mininova, isoHunt and Demonoid. And according to Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard's Business School focused on Internet regulation, that longer-tail assortment of piracy outlets means the starting point for finding pirated content has shifted to an even more resilient source: Google ( GOOG - news - people ).

"Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done," Edelman says. "And if they're prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense."

By searching for pirated music or video, Google users can easily scan a range of lesser-known pirate sites to dig up illicit content. Those looking for the upcoming film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance, can search for "wolverine torrent." The first result is a link to file-sharing site isoHunt, with a torrent tracker file that allows the user to download the full film. In fact, searches for "wolverine torrent" on Google have more than quadrupled since the movie file was first leaked to peer-to-peer networks on April 5, according to Google Trends.

Googling more obscure films works just as well. For example, search for "the maltese falcon torrent," and the first result links to Torrentz.com, which in turn links to other sites hosting torrent trackers for the Bogart classic, including Mininova, BTjunkie, Torrenthound and Seedpeer.

Google, for its part, says it is vigilant about removing illegal content. "We are committed to respecting copyrights and have a well-established process under the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] for removing links to infringing content when they appear in our search results," a company spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Yahoo! did not respond immediately to requests seeking comment.

But Google and Yahoo! ( YHOO - news - people ) have always been a starting point for peer-to-peer piracy, says Eric Garland, chief executive of the bittorrent research firm Big Champagne. In focus groups, Garland says he's found that users begin their searches for pirated movies on search engines as often as any source, including the Pirate Bay. That means preventing a user from downloading copyrighted files would mean not simply shutting down the Pirate Bay, but every one of the lesser-traveled sites that Google or Yahoo! provide links to.

"I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search," Garland says. "As long as there's robust search that allows people to find the titles they're seeking, you will have this problem, period."

The Pirate Bay's guilty verdict was partly due to its notoriety as a flagrant source of pirated content. The site thumbed its nose publicly at its detractors in interviews with Wired, Vanity Fair,Forbes and other news outlets and its administrators publicly posted their retorts to cease-and-desist letters, including repeated suggestions that media company lawyers perform painful acts on their nether regions with a retractable baton.

Google, on the other hand, may be more legally defensible than any single torrent site. Any piracy-related activity by its users would be dwarfed by the search engine's massive number of legitimate users, says Big Champagne's Garland, and Google is careful to avoid any encouragement of copyright infringing activity.

"Google doesn't call itself 'The Pirate Google,'" Garland says. "If the number of queries looking for copyrighted works is massive, that's only because the number of searches on Google in general is massive."

Google's popularity as a resilient portal for piracy means that even if the media industry were to pursue torrent sites one by one, the search engine would always link to the newest site to host those tracking files, a potentially endless war on torrent sites.

"It's a cat and mouse game," says Harvard's Edelman. "Sometimes the mouse gets eaten. But there are always more mice scurrying around, willing to try their luck."
ah, so if TPB offered search results for "legitimate" queries as well, or perhaps removed the word "Pirate" from their name, this would all be moot? lol.

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Ars wrote:Big Content seeks injunction as Pirate Bay appeals verdict
A Swedish court found the four Pirate Bay defendants guilty last week, but an appeal means the case could take years to end. In the meantime, why is the site still running? The music industry says it is filing suit to have the site shuttered, but Pirate bay admins say they aren't going anywhere.

The Pirate Bay verdict is in, but the site operators aren't in jail, haven't paid any fines, and continue to run the site. They have also filed their promised appeal in the case, ensuring that the whole episode will drag on for quite some time. That's just fine with The Pirate Bay's administrators, though, who today speculated that the case will take another two to three years to wrap up. In the meantime, "The site will live on!"

The fact that the site lives on is a little weird, given the guilty verdict, the 30 million kronor fine, and the year of jail time for all defendants. What's missing from the collection of penalties? An injunction shutting down The Pirate Bay.

A spokesperson for the Motion Picture Association said after the verdict, "We now look to the Swedish authorities to end this criminal enterprise," but that apparently won't happen without another win in court. John Kennedy, head of international music trade group IFPI, told the New York Times last week that his group "planned to file additional litigation to try to get The Pirate Bay shut down."

The Pirate Bay defendants don't believe that will happen. Moreover, they are convinced that "what we do is right" and that "millions of users are a good proof of that." In addition, they don't want people to collect donations for them, "since we will not pay any fines!"

Instead, people are encouraged to keep seeding torrents, start more BitTorrent sites, and vote for pro-pirate EU parliamentarians in this summer's upcoming elections (where the Swedish Piratpartiet, for instance, is hoping to pick up a seat).

The pride that the site's operators take in their service ("Say it loud, say it proud!") seems to come from a belief that free access to music and movies paid for by others isn't just good for business (certainly one plausible argument demonstrated by innovative artists like Trent Reznor) but is a sort of civil right. Such an attitude is certainly on display in many of comments left at The Pirate bay blog.

One user from India writes, "When I use uTorrent to download torrent files from TPB I notice most of my peers are from rich countries downloading the same music I want but is prohibitively expensive in my country. Why are they downloading too if they are citizens of developed countries? It is only because they too feel that they are being over-charged for their entertainment about which they can do nothing but take subversive measures against the injustice and exploitation of cartels who have used their influence in government to enact laws which makes their own consumers thieves." When someone "feels" overcharged for something they want, taking it instead has become ethically allowable—a point confirmed by the fact that "millions of users" are doing it.

This may be the real weakness of The Pirate Bay verdict and the approach it represents: it will do nothing to address the underlying attitudes that drive copyright infringement (though it has been successful at convincing other Swedish trackers to shut down.)

In other news, UK mobile ISPs are now blocking access to the site. Mobile broadband ISPs such as BT are now blocking access to The Pirate Bay—not because it facilitates copyright infringement, but because it provides unrestricted access to "over 18" content that can include pornography and hacking tools. The new scheme is part of a self-regulatory UK initiative designed to block such content on mobile devices, lest they "fall into the wrong hands." Phone and laptop owners can contact their ISPs to request that sites be unblocked, though one suspects that calling up BT and asking for access to The Pirate Bay or goat-boned.org is not high on anyone's list of fun things to do.
interesting....

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That last paragraph makes me feel rather uneasy to be honest.

Lest they fall into the wrong hands? That is the most poorly deluded excuse for brazen censorship that I have ever seen in a "western" nation.

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Another case that is worth keeping an eye on:
The Beeb wrote:
Hollywood has locked horns with the technology industry over who will control digital entertainment and how it is watched.

The six big film studios say a program called RealDVD violates copyright.

This week a San Francisco court could decide if DVD users can make personal backups the way people do with audio.

"The consumer should have the same fair use rights to copy DVDs just as they have for the last decade with music," said Bill Hankes of RealDVD.

RealDVD, which is made by RealNetworks, allows DVD owners to make digital copies of their discs onto a computer or laptop hard drive for their own personal use without having to pay extra.

Downloadable versions of many movies are available online, and some studios let users make a digital copy of a movie onto a computer by paying more for an "expanded edition" of a DVD.

Many believe this means the consumer is being made to pay twice.

Kevin Hunt who writes the Electronic Jungle column for the Baltimore Sun said: "For 11 years, since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) made it illegal to bypass any digital rights management protection system, the movie and music industries have fought a war ostensibly against piracy.

"In reality, it has been a war against the consumer, designed to make people pay more than once for the same song or album or movie."

At the heart of the case the movie studios, represented by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), claim that RealDVD is illegal under the DMCA.

The Association said the software bypasses the copy protection built into DVDs meaning that users could copy a DVD and share it around. The studios have described the product as "Steal DVD."

The real fear being expressed is that the technology would enable people to "rent, rip, and return" DVDs.

These are the terms used to describe someone who rents a DVD, copies the content onto a hard drive and returns the movie without ever paying for the unauthorised copy.

"Our objective is to get the illegal choices out of the marketplace and instead focus constructively with the technology community on bringing in more innovative and flexible legal options for consumers to enjoy movies," Greg Goeckner, executive vice president and general counsel, MPAA told the BBC in an e-mail statement.

RealNetworks, which makes RealDVD, claimed that in actual fact the company has enhanced the security of the product.

"We have added an extra layer of security encryption, the same the government uses, to ensure piracy is not a possibility," said RealDVD spokesman Mr Hankes.

A digital version made using RealDVD can only be played on the computer that made the copy.

The DVD Copy Control Association, which is primarily responsible for the copy protection of DVDs and also suing RealNetworks, told the BBC it would not comment until the case is resolved.

The Association said the software bypasses the copy protection built into DVDs meaning that users could copy a DVD and share it around. The studios have described the product as "Steal DVD."

The real fear being expressed is that the technology would enable people to "rent, rip, and return" DVDs.

These are the terms used to describe someone who rents a DVD, copies the content onto a hard drive and returns the movie without ever paying for the unauthorised copy.

"Our objective is to get the illegal choices out of the marketplace and instead focus constructively with the technology community on bringing in more innovative and flexible legal options for consumers to enjoy movies," Greg Goeckner, executive vice president and general counsel, MPAA told the BBC in an e-mail statement.

RealNetworks, which makes RealDVD, claimed that in actual fact the company has enhanced the security of the product.

"We have added an extra layer of security encryption, the same the government uses, to ensure piracy is not a possibility," said RealDVD spokesman Mr Hankes.

A digital version made using RealDVD can only be played on the computer that made the copy.

The DVD Copy Control Association, which is primarily responsible for the copy protection of DVDs and also suing RealNetworks, told the BBC it would not comment until the case is resolved.

"It is not uncommon for content owners to be initially concerned about the manner in which their content will be treated by new technology. That is why we went to talk to the studios before we released the product," said Mr Hankes.

The National Consumers League, a 100-year-old consumer watchdog group, said a survey it conducted in conjunction with RealNetworks showed consumers want choice.

"The entertainment industry would be wise to pay attention to the attitudes and purchase desire of the typical American consumer, who, according to our survey, is very interested in being able to back up his or her collection," said executive director Sally Greenberg.

To some extent the genie is already out of the bottle because there are a number of illegal ways to do what ReadDVD does.

"Consumer behaviour is going to continue regardless of what happens in this court case. The question is can Hollywood and technology get out in front of it so the consumer adopts legitimate behaviour," said Mr Hankes.

Fred Von Lohmann, a senior lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested the picture is not so black and white.

"Hollywood says that without encryption, the DVD market would collapse. I say, the pirates have already won, the software to copy is free and you're still selling DVDs."

"The sky has not fallen," added Mr Von Lohmann.

The case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is being heard by Judge Marilyn Patel. She presided over the Napster case and eventually shut down the original peer-to-peer music file-sharing service.

The hearing, which will resume on Thursday, is expected to end this week with closing arguments this Friday or the following week. Most people expect Judge Patel to deliver her decision in a written ruling in the coming weeks.

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This case will come down in favor of the studios for sure. The DMCA, stupid as it is, is law. Since the software has to decrypt the data in order to make a copy, it's violating that law. Unfortunately fair use is not only a weaker law, but is commonly misunderstood. It only covers copying works for educational research or study. It does not cover making copies of something just because you already bought it, and that includes making tape copies of your own records.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

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it ain't over yet...
Ars wrote:Big Content appeals Pirate Bay case—damages were too low

No one's happy about The Pirate Bay verdict. The site admins, who are now on the hook for a collective 30 million kronor in damages plus one year each in jail, have charged that the judge was biased. But the movie and music businesses have filed an appeal of their own, saying that the 30 million kronor in damages wasn't nearly enough; the amount should be closer to Skr100 million (about US$13 million).
It's a small world after all

The "spectrial" became even more of a spectacle this week as the Swedish judiciary announced that it would consider The Pirate Bay's claims against the trial judge. That judge, Tomas Norström, belongs to the Swedish Copyright Association along with Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky, and Monique Wadsted—all lawyers who represented the recording industry in The Pirate Bay trial.

Additionally, Norström also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an advocacy group that pushes stricter copyright laws. The Pirate Bay has charged that this was a total conflict of interest and that the verdict must be thrown out.

According to the court of appeals (English translation), a decision on the matter will be made not by "section 1" of the court, which deals with copyright claims, but "section 2." The court decided that it would be "appropriate" to have a judge totally uninvolved in the case and in copyright law weigh the merits of The Pirate Bay's objection.

So the court chose judge Anders Eka to lead the inquiry. The court went out of its way to note that Eka and his two fellow judges have not "been members of any groups involved in the case."

Sound fair? Not to The Pirate Bay. Defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi noted on his blog today that a little googling actually turned up links between Eka and industry lawyers Wadsted and Danowsky. All oversee the "research center for media rights" at The Stockholm Center for Commercial Law.

The Center, based at the University of Stockholm, doesn't appear to be an advocacy group and would seem to have nothing in particular to do with copyrights. Over the last few years, it has hosted seminars on such scintillating topics as "International liability of arrangers for securities-offering circulars" and "EC Directives: What is left of the prohibition on horizontal enforcement?"

Still, the links indicate that Eka knows and has worked with some of the key lawyers in the case, though in a country the size of Sweden, this sort of mixing within a profession is hard to completely avoid. That doesn't make it less of an issue, though; similar concerns were raised here in the US about Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, who decades ago served as the lawyer for the judge in the Joel Tenenbaum file-swapping trial.
More cash (and more charges), please

But even as the legal maneuvering takes place over the impartiality of Norström and Eka, the rightsholders have filed an appeal of their own. In addition to seeking more cash, lawyers for the content owners want the charge of "infringing copyright" restored against the defendants.

That charge was dropped on the trial's second day (rightsholders settled for a lesser charge of helping others infringe copyright), but it could reappear if the appeal succeeds.

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So, the prosecution themselves dropped the charge realising that they had no hope of a conviction in that trial, and yet want to appeal that very charge - and they want more money? It's a shame I can't sue these folk for excessive CO2 output.

Re: Pirate Bay trial

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BBC wrote:Pirate Bay retrial call rejected

The four men behind the site said they would not pay the fine.

A Swedish court has thrown out a request for a retrial by the four men behind The Pirate Bay website.

The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement in April and face jail sentences and hefty claims for damages.

The Pirate Bay's lawyers called for a retrial when it emerged that one of the judges in the case belonged to several copyright protection groups.

The Swedish court said the judge's affiliations did not bias the case.

The Svea Court of Appeal said Judge Tomas Norstrom should have declared that he was a member of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Swedish Copyright Association before the case went to trial.

"The fact that he failed to shed light on this does not however mean that there was any wrongdoing during the proceedings that would require a retrial," said the court in a statement.

"This was not a case of bias," concluded the court.

No appeal is allowed against the judgement.

The Pirate Bay is well-known for hosting lists of links that give people access to pirated copies of movies, music, software and TV shows.

The Pirate Bay defended itself saying that it did not infringe copyright because none of the pirated material is stored on its servers.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

The four men behind The Pirate Bay, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde, were sentenced to one year in jail and told to pay damages of 30m Swedish kronor (£2.3m, 2.7m euros) to entertainment companies such as Warner Bros and Sony Music Entertainment.

In response to the ruling Peter Sunde said The Pirate Bay would now file charges against Sweden for violating the human rights of the defendants.
BBC wrote:Pirate Bay starts video streaming

The world's most high-profile file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay (TPB), has lifted the lid on its new video sharing website, The Video Bay.

Billed as a rival to YouTube, the service will offer unrestricted video content, in violation of copyright law.

It is not clear when the service will actually go live; the site's founders said "it will be done when it's done".

In April, a court in Sweden jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay and ordered them to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Speaking by video link to the Open Video Conference in New York, TBP founder Peter Sunde said the service would use the latest HTML 5 features.

"More specifically the audio and video tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats," he said.

"This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk encoding, so please don't bug us too much if the site isn't working properly," he added.

Although the site is in its early stages, a preview showed a number of copyright music videos available for viewing in the navigation sidebar.

The move will be seen by some as provocative, given that the founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail in April, though they are currently still free men.

Piracy battle

Speaking to the BBC, the head of Sweden's Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge, said this was another step in a "prolonged legal battle with the record industry".

"It's obvious that, given enough time, The Pirate Bay will win this war which will go on as long as the record industry has yet another penny to file a lawsuit.

"I think they [The Pirate Bay] are taking an important part in that battle, fighting for freedom of expression and culture against monopolistic companies," he added.

A spokesman for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said they were monitoring developments but declined to comment at this time.

Re: Pirate Bay trial

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Well, it looks to be more than just a new project by the guys of TPB...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... goes-legit
Le Inq wrote:FILESHARING SITE The Pirate Bay is lowering the Jolly Roger and setting sail under the legitimate flag of Global Gaming Factory, a Swedish software company that also runs Internet cafes.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) is to pay 60 million kronor ($7.8 million) for the download service in a mixture of shares and cash.

Pirate Bay had become one of the largest file-sharing sites on the web. But in April the four Swedes running the site were convicted of copyright infringement, sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.9 million).

GGF intends to take Pirate Bay legit by developing a way to pay copyright holders when their content is downloaded via the BitTorrent catalogue tracking site.

To achieve this, GGF plans to splash out a further 100 million kronor on Peerialism, another Swedish company, which has developed its own peer-to-peer technology.

So will this move encourage other wannabe pirates to set up in the hope that their noteriety will bring offers from a corporate chequebook bigger than the damages awarded against them? Unlikely say legal experts.

"The Pirate Bay founders have been forced down this path by circumstance and criminal conviction," says professor Jonathan Ezor of the Touro Law Centre in New York. "I don't see too many purchasers likely to buy the truly illegal sites for any significant money, especially if the purchaser has to retain the liability with the purchase."

The four founders of Pirate Bay - Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Carl Lundström - say they won't be receiving any money from the sale, but will use some of the proceeds for "Internet-related projects in the shape of political activism."

They say ownership of the site was transferred to other parties in 2006 but are remaining tight-lipped about who those parties are.

The four were denied a retrial last week when the judge in the case was cleared of allegations of bias.

The Pirate Bay story so far is not dissimilar to that of Napster, the peer-to-peer music site set up by Shawn Fanning in 1999, which was closed in 2001 after it was successfully sued by A&M Records.

After a fallow spell in the hands of Roxio, rights to the Napster name were bought by giant US electronics retailer Best Buy for $121 million in September 2008.

Best Buy doesn't split out Napster's revenues but downloads from the service peaked at around 27 million in February 2001, a few months before legal action forced its closure. µ

Re: Pirate Bay trial

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8173388.stm
The Beeb wrote:The world's most high-profile file-sharing website the Pirate Bay faces a new volley of legal action.

Thirteen Hollywood production companies have filed a new lawsuit to try to get the website shut down.

In April the site's founders were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

However, the site has continued to operate, allowing users to share copyrighted films, TV and music.

"We have filed a complaint against The Pirate Bay because they have not stopped their activities after they were sentenced to prison," the studios' lawyer Monique Wadsted told AFP.

The lawsuit has been brought by Columbia Pictures, Disney Enterprises, Universal Studios and 10 other firms, many of which were due to receive damages form the April settlement.

The Pirate Bay was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content was hosted on The Pirate Bay's web servers; instead it hosted links to TV, film and music files held on its users' computers.

Following the most recent lawsuit, the site was bought by Global Gaming Factory (GGF) for 60m kronor (£4.7m) who intend to turn the site into a legal, pay service.

The new owners have outlined a "give and take" model which pays users for sharing their resources.