4 convicted in Pirate Bay file-sharing trial

[Turborama]

Source: AP

8 minutes ago

STOCKHOLM (AP) — A Swedish court has convicted four men linked to the popular Pirate Bay file-sharing site of breaking Sweden's copyright law.

The Stockholm district court sentenced Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundstrom to one year each in prison.

They were also ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a series of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

The Pirate Bay provides a forum for its estimated 22 million users to freely download music, movies and computer games through so-called torrent files. The site has become the entertainment industry's enemy No. 1 after successful court actions against file-swapping sites such as Grokster and Kazaa.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hspvgQydv-el2qT9uJIKl2ElgILAD97K4FF00

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DAMN!

Pirate Bay defendants found guilty
by Mats Lewan

Source:CNET

=snip=


The Web site--one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world--offers a search engine for torrents that can be used for file sharing. It also offers a tracker, which is a server that keeps file swappers linked.

After a 13-day trial, Judge Tomas Norström, plus his assistant, and three namndeman (essentially a jury with extended powers), found ample evidence for a guilty verdict, though no actual files are stored on the Web site.

Aside from jail terms, as a result of a civil claim filed alongside the criminal case, 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.

The four defendants have already vowed to appeal the verdict, and it could take years before the case reaches Sweden's Supreme Court.

Stay with CNET News for more details and analysis of this developing story: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10221666-93.html

[Oregone]

1. I bet this gets overturned

The bottom line is that they don't host the content. They don't even offer links to download the files (you pull tiny pieces from thousands of different people and software puts it back together). They really are not more guilty of how the people use the software than the actual programmers of the torrent software. Can't we go so far as to blame the programmers of the operating systems while we are at it, since it all aids in the crime?

Its a search engine and there is a link to information that can be used by software to pull tiny pieces from thousands of people. What that software reconstructs with the aid of the torrent file, from the millions of packets from thousands of people might just look like duplicated data (much like the data you copy at a synaptic level when you listen to music).

Google is a search engine too. They link to pages that offer direct pirated downloads.

Isn't Google more guilty? Google has better lawyers.

This is a huge gray area, and I wonder if the court was savvy enough to "get it". TPB is a search engine. Unlike Google, it links to more 'bad' content than 'good', but thats how it operates.

BTW, Google is a good place to look for torrents, since it indexes multiple torrent engines. Google links to sites that link to torrents that help people connect to thousands of others and pass packets back and forth.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. These guys will probably tell the prosecutors to packet in

their *ss.

[Blandocyte]

3. Punning

will come around and byte you in the end.

[DS1]

14. K

[Turborama]

13. You are right on target with your Google comments

Also, torrent sharing has too many heads and when they cut one off, several sprout up instantly anyway. These fuckwits are only doing one thing with this action, informing the masses who didn't know about torrents already.

I bet the amount of people who torrent is going to increase exponentially because of this stupidity.

[mwooldri]

4. PirateBay may go away but more will come up in its place...

... the genie is out the bottle guys!

There will always be that guy at the flea market selling those black-market DVDs.

Mark.

[conspirator]

5. FUCK CORPORATIONS. Ban pirate bay. some other site will raise nt

[tomm2thumbs]

6. years and years and years this thing will stretch out... computers won't exist by then

we'll all be sloshing around in tubs of electromagnetic organisms that please our every whim across a plasmic 'internet'.

It's going to be sponsored by Taco Bell of course.

[Turborama]

7. Wow, is that before or after we all get our flying cars?

As long it doesn't all end up like "Idiocracy", I'm totally up for some of that sloshing.

[jeff30997]

8. There was a big site that was closed that way about 4 years ago.

It was called Suprnova and back then that was THE place to go for torrents.After the site was shut down

dozens of others took its place.Gee! Now guess what will happen after this "victory".Stupid greedy

bastards.

[guruoo]

9. Once again, the sorcerer's apprentence smashes the broom...

[heliarc]

10. If these guys go to jail for pirating media...

The corporate a-holes should go to jail for years and years of planned obsolescence. They can go to jail for making the products we buy useless after 2 years and forcing us all to buy in over and over and over again with crap that doesn't last.

If they think pirating is unfair than they should join the club. Either that or stop inventing technology whose primary purpose is to further the consumers power for mechanical reproduction.

"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."

Have a taste of your own medicine idiots.

[Pavulon]

11. Morons never learn...

AES 256 data wrap in flight and on disk. Impervious to DPI (content snooping) SSL-VPN using already open source tool (transaction is in a secure tunnel). Floating index from server to server (what is where) and game fucking over. Distributed update authority with no master key cert or masters hosted in country with no laws on DRM. So now you have secure content, secure comm, and secure index.

These cocksuckers should have learned with napster. Now we have a system much more complex. If they fuck with that I guess everyone will stop downloading shit?

Supremes ruled you can not be compelled to give up a password. ECC AES will never be broken in public. It is possible but the people who do that work could give a fuck about the new wolverine movie.

[cosmicone]

12. Sorry but I don't speak Techlish would you kindly

translate that to English?

[Pavulon]

19. When the Media companies mess with these networks

the response is to increase their sophistication.

Your ISP can see what you do if you do not take steps to protect your traffic. Bank sites take some precautions but there are much better ways of protecting your anonymity online.

Basically it is like using a code when writing letters.

[Irreverend IX]

22. "It is possible"

How can AES be broken? Everything I've read suggests it would take millions of years to break a 256-bit key with any hardware that exists now or is predicted to exist in the future. Would it involve that molecular "DNA computing?"

[mainegreen]

23. Sometimes there are surprising tricks to breaking algorithms.

For example, some have been shown to be weak when the attacker knows the hardware the encryption was run on and has an approximate knowledge of the latency between them and the target. If the key is bigger, it takes longer to encrypt. Surprise! A shortcut to cracking it that doesn't require doing all the math to eliminate possible keys.

You never know what kind of tricks outside the basic brute force math someone might find.

[DS1]

15. This is why I host my pirate tracker with a Somali ISP

[enola fay]

16. Seems pretty unfair to me

considering it is just a search engine and doesn't actually store the files. I don't know Swedish law regarding this stuff, but it just seems ridiculously harsh. I hope they win their appeal.

[Turborama]

17. They've posted a couple of quite long vids on the site and they seem quite happy, actually

Check it out, thepiratebay dot org (don't want to use a live link for obvious reasons).

The site itself is still doing it's usual thing too, For example, there's lots of versions of Lost around at the mo, lol.

[enola fay]

18. Huh?

I don't get it. Why would they be happy?

[Turborama]

20. Free international publicity, I guess?

If you go to the site and click on "Press conference here", the people on the video who are giving a "press conference" seemed in good spirits, is what I meant. Haven't watched the whole thing, just the 1st minute or so, will watch it all later...

BTW, I totally concur with your comments about the harshness etc, totally unfair considering...

[enola fay]

21. Oh, sure. I guess that makes sense...

but could prove to be a bad thing in the end by exacerbating the backlash. Hmm...it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Anyway, I hope they are victorious because I use that site and think it is one of the best.

[Vidar]

24. Damn--one of my favorites.