[Kosh]

Wonder if anything will come to it

Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation

[Rick James]

Brokep, TiAMO and the others seem to have very high hopes for this trial, but there's probably at least five-to-one odds in favor of the plaintiffs pulling something out of their collective ass to make life frustrating for defendants at the most inopportune time.

Still, even if The Pirate Bay is closed, according to Brokep there are already multiple backups in place, so this trial is really a futile endeavor at best, unless one of course considers the terrible precedent which could be set if the plaintiffs win...

[Flipside]

On the plus side, DRM is currently under close inspection by the FTC because of possible violations of consumer rights...

http://www2.ftc.gov/opa/2008/12/drm.shtm

Already groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have submitted their views to the FTC, mostly to the negative.

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/02/09

[Dilmah G]

Nooo! Not TPB!

And secondly, why the hell did they wait till NOW to press charges

[redsniper]

Didn't have a case?

[Polpolion]

 

[Nuclear1]

Good, now they just have to go after bittorrent, BushTorrent, demoinoid, isohunt...

[captain-custard]

Good, now they just have to go after bittorrent, BushTorrent, demoinoid, isohunt...

and then the new back ups each of these sites will create , so lets do the maths ........ 5-5 = 20   we win

[Dark RevenantX]

****.  Just ****.

Edit: uh-oh.  While posting this, I got an SMF error.  Having experience with running a SMF forum, I know you've got the beginnings of server issues.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Not to mention the word filter doesn't seem to be working. 

[ssmit132]

I didn't pay any attention to that when I glanced over it the first time.

I don't really know how to respond to this.

[kode]

Nooo! Not TPB!

And secondly, why the hell did they wait till NOW to press charges

Because it takes quite some time to build a case from the amount of hardware and so on that they acquired during the raid, obviously.

And they're being charged with _accessory_ to copyright violations. Accessory is ****ing easy to get convicted for. It more or less takes that you just hold a guys jacket while he punches the living **** out of someone, regardless of whether you knew his intentions or not before you received it.

[Dilmah G]

Nooo! Not TPB!

And secondly, why the hell did they wait till NOW to press charges

Because it takes quite some time to build a case from the amount of hardware and so on that they acquired during the raid, obviously.

And they're being charged with _accessory_ to copyright violations. Accessory is ****ing easy to get convicted for. It more or less takes that you just hold a guys jacket while he punches the living **** out of someone, regardless of whether you knew his intentions or not before you received it.

Hmmm, fair enough. Well they sure as hell have the goods on TBP, I have no idea how they're going to mount a defense. Regardless, as has been said, they have numerous backups.

[MP-Ryan]

Good, now they just have to go after bittorrent, BushTorrent, demoinoid, isohunt...

Actually, they can't touch the BitTorrent protocol because it is merely a file-sharing technology, which is actually being utilized by large businesses as a modern distribution medium in some cases.  The protocol itself isn't violating copyright, it's individual users.  That makes BitTorrent a virtually untouchable system.  Sure, they can go after seed sites for seeding copyrighted material, but the diffuse nature of the technology makes shutting down copyright violators virtually impossible.

While I personally ensure I pay for licenses for all my software or use open-source software which is available for free, I DO hope that the industry will eventually be forced to recognize that DRM strangeholds on legitimate customers will not reduce piracy.  Ultimately, they are forcing the consumers who actually are willing to pay for their material to suffer because of people who wouldn't buy it anyway.  And in many cases they are driving customers to pirate or modify their products to ensure they don't have issues with the DRM scheme.

I don't support software piracy and I think the attitude of "I'll just download it" is wrong, but I do think the industry needs to realize that the measures it's taking are driving consumers away.

[Daniel P]

Good, now they just have to go after bittorrent, BushTorrent, demoinoid, isohunt...

Is it still legal to get  a Playstation CD. I got a game and it got a big crack in it and I am planing to back it up.

If I get caught I show them the Bad CD. 

[Dark RevenantX]

I'll pirate something once in a blue moon, but it's only either 1. out of necessity (absolutely need Photoshop in order to complete a required-to-pass-the-class school assignment) or 2. having absolutely no money to buy something I've been trying to get for years.  And in many cases, the pirated version works better than the DRM-infested one, which is kinda sad IMO.

[Pred the Penguin]

Is it still legal to get  a Playstation CD. I got a game and it got a big crack in it and I am planing to back it up.

If I get caught I show them the Bad CD. 

Can unmodified PS3s play back-ups?

[Rick James]

Is it still legal to get  a Playstation CD. I got a game and it got a big crack in it and I am planing to back it up.

If I get caught I show them the Bad CD. 

Can unmodified PS3s play back-ups?

Depends on the quality of the backup. Precise bit-to-bit copies have a better chance of running, but it's difficult to say precisely what a basic copy would do--Sony hardware is finicky over little things like what brand of media is used, and the delightful irony is that not even Sony CDs/DVDs work all the time.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I assume most of the viewers here have seen Steal This Film Part 1?

This isn't the first time the operators of TPB have had a run-in with the law.

In fact, it is speculated that, when they were taken in by the police some years back, the Americans were pulling the strings. Specifically, the MPAA.

At any rate, the operators of TBP have claimed that they've shortened the time it takes for TBP's servers to restart themselves in the event of any run-ins, so I'm not really that panicky over this.

As it has been stated before, the protocol is legal. It's only a matter of using it to download what, so in that sense, there really is no case against TBP because they only host tracker files that are essentially a list of instructions for the BitTorrent client to follow in order to download the actual content.

[kode]

Well, if anyone's interested to know, the prosecution dropped half the charges today, removing the acts of producing copies infringing copyright and instead having it be "making works available to the public" (not bad for a farce set to continue for another 11 days). The evidence presented so far does not feel very convincing to me, they might have trouble proving that the downloads were actually facilitated through the pirate bay.

Also, IFPI has become cider.