File under O for “obvious.”
Today the Swedish justice system has found four muckey-mucks from The Pirate Bay guilty and subject to a year each in the klink, along with just under $1,000,000 in penalties each. The charge? “Assisting in making copyright content available.” Huh. The Pirate Bay’s administrators and financial backers were assisting in copyright infringement. Who’da thunk it?
One thing I’m quite unclear on about this matter is why they’ve bothered to fight this (including continuing the operation of the torrent tracker) when apparently they’re going the martyr route. They have been able to offer no defense that their site wasn’t intended to assist in infringing copyrights. This was clearly their intention. The Pirate Bay isn’t a massive clearinghouse for open-source freeware and public domain art. If this is an exercise in civil disobedience, they should be pleading guilty and getting to work on the Swedish nerd version of Letters from a Birmingham Prison.
one down 10,000 to go
only 10,000?
Well, it’s certainly over 9,000. I can’t believe I just typed that.