This article was written by Thilus and originally posted on his LiveJournal. It is being reposted here, almost verbatim (with some minor grammatical changes), at his open request. While these are not my words and I don’t share some of his anecdotal experiences, I couldn’t have said any of this better myself.
So we finally have an official verdict in the first round of prosecution against The Pirate Bay, or rather the four brave souls willing to play the part of human shields over it.
All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.
“Assisting in making copyright content available.” What the hell? I was doing that myself when I was fourteen, from the cheap computer in my family’s dining room over a free modem connection. Congratulations, authorities: you’ve succeeded, after all this pomp and circumstance, in royally screwing up the lives of four industrious people with the same charge you would have used to convict me at fourteen for sharing scanned comic books over AOL.
Me, or anyone else, really. It’s the vague and pervasive wording on this that really bothers me. Find me someone in modern society who isn’t guilty of “assisting in making copyrighted material available.” Go on, I challenge you. Yes, your IPhone counts as entrapment. So does your TiVo, your PC, your XBox, and probably a fax machine.
Over a million dollars in fines each and one year in jail. I doubt the money will even be a problem in a case like this… it’ll come form somewhere, these guys aren’t stupid and they’ve had a long time to prepare. And jail time is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I even need to go into how utterly backwards and counterproductive that is? No matter what kind of prison circumstances these guys end up in (I really have no idea, either), it’s supposed to what, give them a year in which to build even more hate for the system and plan what they’re going to do when they get out? Or give them a year to turn into paranoid, survivalist animals? No matter how I look at it, this counts as complete bullshit.
If nothing else, these guys are obviously damned good at what they do, and not likely to appreciate being dicked so hard by The Man. Why not throw them a bone instead and put them to some sort of positive community service. Heal the breach a little, don’t make it worse, you fucking idiots. Cops everywhere are all the same, root out the evil and all that’s left will be sunshine and rainbows. Bullshit. Black and white thinking only means that eventually something purple will appear and run your colorblind ass over because you couldn’t see it.
Continue reading ‘Pirate Bay Founders Found Guilty. Of Something. They’re Pretty Sure.’
If You Like Stealing Music, You’ll LOVE Burger King’s Cheeseburger Deals!
TorrentFreak has told its friends about Burger King’s new King Deals. So cheap, and so tasty. Oh, also, their ad makes no sense. Apparently, Burger King is like downloading music from the Internet, only legal.
Check out the original post for the original ad. In the meantime, I’ll show you my improvements to it: