back to article Swedish Supreme Court chucks out Pirate Bay appeal bid

The four founders behind The Pirate Bay saw their final attempt to appeal against an earlier ruling rejected in Sweden's Supreme Court today. That means that nearly three years after Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg were handed prison sentences and hefty fines for their involvement in the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    freedom of speech

    Long may the freedom the Pirate Bay has to distribute links to whoever has whatever continue. They may have to change domain names, server locations and IP addresses once in a while, but It'll probably take lawyers longer to shut those down than for them to update users with the new ones. Perhaps one day TPB will be something very many of us share the hosting of using technologies similar to Tor and distributed hash tables.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Err...

      They're called The Pirate Bay, it sort of suggests what they're up for.

      They told people who complained about their copyright material being listed on TPB to "Fuck Off".

      They ran the torrent trackers, which were rqeuired to torrents to operate.

      They're hardly just an innocent indexing service, dressing it up as freedom of speech doesn't somehow make it right.

      1. PyLETS
        Pirate

        Freedom of speech and conditionality

        This freedom may reasonably be conditional on some things e.g. public safety - so you can't shout "fire" in a crowed theatre, or the rights of those rich enough to defend their reputation if you libel those who can afford to sue you and can prove that what you said was false. But once it's made conditional on copyright owners finding your speech convenient to their business interests, then it isn't freedom of speech at all.

        Also TPB don't host trackers and they haven't for about 2 years. Trackers are not needed anymore, so long as peers share addresses of other peers with each other as they now do.

        The innocence or otherwise of an indexing service as perceived by copyright owners is besides the point, the question is whether the business interests of copyright owners justifies suppressing freedom of speech in saying where some machines happen to be sharing what.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @PyLETS

          Please note the tense in my comment - at the time of the trial TPB were actively hosting torrent trackers. It doesn't really matter if they are now, or not, they were then and that is what they were tried on.

      2. Mad Mike
        FAIL

        @Ac

        TPB were doing nothing that google isn't doing. They didn't host anything, they merely indexed. The verdict effectively makes Google guilty as well. They index more pirate material than TPB ever did. Course, they are 'innocent' as they own enough politicians and are (to coin a recently used term) 'too big to prosecute'.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Kangaroo court

    This transvestite of a judicial system paying kowtow to USA/MAFIAAS is what Assange is trying to avoid, as he fights extradition. One could not ask for a better example of a corrupted legal system, ignoring laws, ruling on their own interests, as this whole pirate bay debacle.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yes...

      Because I'll listen to the political analysis of someone who can't tell the difference between a travesty and a transvestite.

      1. The Fuzzy Wotnot

        Pink Pussycat Club

        I dunno, some of those judges, all being ex-public schoolboys, do have some very kinky past times when they're not presiding!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The fact that I am not a native english speaker and wrote transvestite instead of travesty doesn't change the validity of the analysis. But of course a typical strategy when you don't have arguments is to focus on how the message is delivered, and try to distract from the content.

        1. Doug Glass
          Go

          Right. Words don't matter, just the idea you can't articulate matters.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It's probably autocomplain^H^H^Hete.

  3. Graham Wilson
    Flame

    What else would you expect?

    Pirate Bay won't be safe anywhere in the EU.

    The fact they're operating anywhere within thought distance of the EU is a good enough reason to question their collective intelligence.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not resident?

    "none of the four men reside in Sweden now, so imprisoning them in that country might prove difficult for the legal authorities there"

    Have I understood this right, having been convicted by the first court, they remained at liberty while appealing. But the appeal having been completed they are no longer in the country. Do the Scandinavians not believe in bail or holding on remand?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AC 1 Feb, 14:39 GMT: Running with the hares and hunting with the hounds

    "Do the Scandinavians not believe in bail or holding on remand?"

    I suspect the Swedish authorities proceded with the case as instructed by their US overlords in order to avoid serious economic and espionage repercussions, whilst well aware of the potential unpopularity and consequent infeasibility of keeping these individuals locked up in practice:

    http://torrentfreak.com/swedes-demonstrate-against-pirate-bay-verdict-090418/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Fits with their long policy of remaining neutral

      No matter who is fighting who

      (The number of famous Swedish generals being in single digits)

  6. zb
    Joke

    Planking

    They are lucky that they will not be made to suffer the traditional penalty for pirates of walking the plank.

    1. Figgus
      Joke

      Even worse, they would make the four go do some stupid planking photos. I'd rather just drown.

  7. mhenriday
    WTF?

    To paraphrase the Bard,

    something is rotten in the state of Sweden, that wholly owned subsidiary to a wholly owned subsidiary to the MPAA and the RIAA. But we didn't need the ghost of an independent Högsta Domstol (Supreme Court) to tell us that, did we ?...

    Henri

  8. Tony Paulazzo

    >They are lucky that they will not be made to suffer the traditional penalty for pirates of walking the plank.<

    Actually, I believe the pirates made the high muckety fucks walk the plank, pirates were hanged.

    Boycott Hollywood!

  9. Andy Davies

    "They told people who complained about their copyright material being listed on TPB to "Fuck Off"."

    Did they really? How Splendid!

    AndyD 8-)#

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