Pirate Bay defendants found guilty, sentenced to jail
Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 17, 2009 2:59 AM | permalink
The four defendants in the Swedish trial of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and $3.6m fine. I don't know much about Swedish copyright law -- and the defense rested on the technical boundaries what constitutes an infringement -- so I have no idea if this is the kind of judgment that is likely to survive the inevitable appeal.A more interesting question is whether The Pirate Bay will disappear now. After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it's certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course -- just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more "moderate" services.
With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).
It's a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that's dedicated to their destruction.
Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.The Pirate Bay trial: guilty verdictProsecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.
They were forced to drop the charge of "assisting copyright infringement" and focus on the lesser charge of "assisting making available copyrighted content". They had been seeking SKr115m (£101m) in compensation for loss of earnings due to the millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.
Previously:
- Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm: Day 1 - Boing Boing
- Steal This Film: Pirate Bay Trial edition - Boing Boing
- Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm: Day 3, the King Kong defense ...
- Pirate Bay offering crypto tools to fight Swedish spying laws ...
- PirateBay's OscarTorrents - download the Oscars - Boing Boing
- Pirate Bay suing major media companies for sabotage, based on ...
- Pirate Bay trying to buy Sealand, offering citizenship - Boing Boing
- How Sweden's "Pirate Bay" site resists the MPAA - Boing Boing
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Three examples of dot matrix printer music
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Younnat used this dot matrix printer to provide the rhythm track to his marimba and synthesizer etude. Soothing.
Sue Harding made music with dot matrix that is a bit more glitchy and alien.
Canadian art duo [The User] made an entire album titled "Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers" by programming large series of text files to play 14 different printers. Dig those track names. (You can grab this on eMusic.)
Younnat used this dot matrix printer to provide the rhythm track to his marimba and synthesizer etude. Soothing.
Sue Harding made music with dot matrix that is a bit more glitchy and alien.
Canadian art duo [The User] made an entire album titled "Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers" by programming large series of text files to play 14 different printers. Dig those track names. (You can grab this on eMusic.)
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