ThePirateBay.org Raided and Shut Down 1189
An anonymous reader writes "ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Slyck.com is reporting their servers have been seized by the Swedish police." What's really interesting about them is the strange political power that they held in their homeland. There was much discussion even of a political party. This will be interesting to watch unfold.
This is the sort of publicity you can't buy. (Score:5, Informative)
What we probably have here is pressure (who doesn't doubt it didn't go down like this [wikipedia.org]) from a foreign organisation to shut down something that's legal under Swedish law. (The torrent files themselves contain no copyrighted information).
Is this going to permanently shutdown thepiratebay.org? I doubt it.
Is this going to help the Pirate Party's chances for election in the September elections and be detrimental to the content oligopolist's interests in the long run? Hell yes.
Mildly offtopic, if TPB is shutdown, the thing I'm going to miss most is their 'legal' section (with legal threats + responses) - here's one of my favorite responses (via google cache [64.233.183.104]): (in response to a threat from Sega europe)
The Political Pirate Party (Score:5, Informative)
From the first link, the aims of the Pirate Party seem to be:
TEXT if slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)
As one of the largest trackers, ThePirateBay.org largely replaced the demise of the SuprNova.org search engine. SuprNova.org met its demise in late 2004, when it was under pressure from the entertainment industry to shut it operation down. Conversely, such pressure has been ineffective against ThePiratebay.org.
When such political pressure fails, the use of force is typically the next course of action. In a move that many thought would never come, Slyck.com learned this morning that ThePirateBay.org was raided by Swedish police.
"...The police right now is taking all of our servers, to check if there is a crime there or not (they are actually not sure)," ThePirateBay.org spokesperson "brokep" told Slyck.com.
The seizure of ThePirateBay.org's entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter.
"We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary," brokep said.
According to The Pirate Party, a Swedish copyright reform organization, the raid also seized Piratbyrån's (the Pirate Bureau) servers. In addition, The Pirate Party reports "...the servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter..." Approximately 50 police participated in the raid, which placed into custody two PirateBay.org personnel.
The premature departure of ThePirateBay.org marks a significant turning point in the BitTorrent community. Although it's not currently known what, if any, entertainment entity is behind this raid, failure to secure ThePirateBay.org's permanent removal will only bolster this tracker's position of defiance.
Re:The Political Pirate Party (Score:4, Informative)
"Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody. Two operators of The Pirate Bay are in police custody, and can't be reached.
Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody. The police chose to do this despite the fact that the services provided by the worlds largest bittorrent tracker are fully legal in Sweden.
The servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter, but this was ignored.
Piratbyrån (the Pirate Bureau), a swedish pro-pirate lobby organisation, also got their servers seized, since they where located in the same room.
Two operators of The Pirate Bay are in police custody, and can't be reached.
This article will be updated as more news come in.
14:35: 50 policemen participated in the raid."
Re:come on, let's face it (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe some of the content was illegal, but what Pirate Bay did was not - at least by Swedish law (IANASwedeL). All they did was host tiny text files and provice a search database. They were a tracker, not a host.
This is basically the same as American cops raiding Bell because the Yellow Pages lists the phone number of a paper mill, and paper can potentially be used to write harassing letters.
Re:Strange political power (Score:3, Informative)
The law doesn't have to change to change (Score:2, Informative)
Now with these guys, perhaps the DA (or equiv) is hoping to score himself some judicial activist judges who are not afraid to identify ostensible theft as theft. They may not care what a .torrent contains, instead they'll just see a festival of crime that needs to be dealt with facing little or no reprecussion from, say, a higher court overturning the verdict because the judicial branch does not wait for the legislative branch to tweak laws.
The Pirate Bay is banking on what I'm describing not happening. Of course I'm using the US as a model, I have no idea what this government is like, but I'm guessing that there are similarities.
Re:odd (Score:5, Informative)
I talkt to the Pirate Party leader, he confirms the raid, confiscated servers (Both Pirate Parties and The Pirate Bay), saying there were 50 policemen in the raid this afternoon (14:00 Cent Eur time).
Re:Legal? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing as I can see it. It's still perfectly legal to link to copyright violating material in Sweden. The police probably hopes that they store some violating material on the servers. Which, hopefully, they don't.
That, or they're after the logs so that they can do it the American Way (tm) and start suing blind 90 year olds and quadriplegics.
Story unfolds... (Score:5, Informative)
For the benefit of those who don't speak swedish, here's a short summary:
3 people have been arrested, age 22, 24 and 28. They have not been charged, but are taken in because they the police suspect they have violated copyright laws. The persons are directly connected to TPB.org. They are as of an hour ago still under interrogation. 50 police men have worked on the case.
Re:odd (Score:2, Informative)
(The text is in swedish but mostly useless propaganda, so I won't bother to translate)
Re:Distributed tracking (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It wasn't the police. (Score:2, Informative)
What the Swedish antipiracy firm (ATB) has to say (Score:5, Informative)
"The Pirate Bay nedstängd
Polisen genomförde idag en rad husrannsakningar mot lokaler där The Pirate Bay bedriver sin verksamhet. Klockan 12 30 stängdes sidan thepiratebay.org ned.
The Pirate Bay var fram tills igår knutpunkten för en stor del av världens illegala fildelning. Enligt egna uppgifter fanns det en dryg miljon användare som kunde laddade upp och ned främst filmer, spel och musik. Genom sin storlek och uttalade målsättning att hänga ut och håna berörda upphovsmän gjorde man The Pirate Bay känd över hela världen. Sverige blev internationellt känt som en fristad för dem som begick upphovsrättsbrott på Internet. Detta utnyttjades ekonomiskt för en omfattande försäljning av annonser, porreklam och insamling av donationer.
Det är bra att den svenska polisen nu prioriterar denna typ av brottslighet. Det är upphovsrätten som finansierar nyskapandet inom film, datorspel, musik och övrig kultur. Den som bryter mot upphovsrättslagen stjäl från framtidens kreatörer och biopublik. Därför är stängningen av The Pirate Bay bra för alla oss som uppskattar ny film och underhållning säger Henrik Pontén, jurist på Antipiratbyrån.
Svenska produktioner drabbas i hög grad av den illegala nedladdningen, säger Per-Erik Wallin, Föreningen Sveriges Filmproducenter. Om svenska filmer finns tillgängliga på nätet före premiären innebär det minskade chanser att filmerna ska spela hem produktionskostnaden och mindre medel för att göra nästa film. Det drabbar både manusförfattare, regissörer, skådespelare och filmarbetare."
Roughly translated
"The pirate bay closed
Today the police raided multiple places were The Pirate Bay conducts its operations. At 12.30 the site thepiratebay.org was closed.
The pirate Bay was until yesterday the center for a large part of the worlds illegal filesharing. According to piratebay itself there was over a million users who could upload or download foremost movies, games and music.
By its size and outspoken goal of ridiculing authors The pirate Bay got known all over the world.
Sweden got known internationally as an asylum for those who commited copyright crimes on the internet. This was use economicaly for a large scale sale of adds, pornadds and donations.
It is good that the swedish police now priority this kind of crime. It is the copyright that finances creation in movies, computergames, music and other culture. Whoever breaks the copyright steals from future auothors and cinema audience. Therefore the closing of The Pirate Bay is good for all of us that apreciate new Movies and entertainment says Henrik Pontén, legal advisor at Antipiratbyrån.
Swedish productions are very much affected by illegal downloading, say Per-Erik Wallin, Föreningen Sveriges Filmproducenter. If swedish movies are availible on the net before the premiere chances are smaller that the movies will get the production cost back and less means to make the next movie. It affects both scriptwriters, directors, actors and filmcrews."
Note that this truly is a crappy translation.
Re:come on, let's face it (Score:5, Informative)
Whether Sweden has anything like this, I have no idea.
Re:The Political Pirate Party (Score:1, Informative)
But does that really apply to GPL? If you really care about these things, you should discuss on PPs forum. Its a party, it will do whatever its members wants it to do, but it needs to actually know what they want!
First hand information here: (Score:5, Informative)
The Pirate Bureau have set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about this whole incident: http://piratbyran.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Shutting down The Pirate Bay can be compared to shutting down Google, by Swedish laws. Both sites supply a search engine with which you can find legal and illegal material on the internet. TPB will prevail.
Re:First hand information here: (Score:3, Informative)
"The Pirate Bay exists SOLELY for the unauthorized distribution on copyrighted works."
First off, this is so wrong. Until today I was sharing my own independent movie production through TPB. So the "solely" part is incorrect.
But in any case, it is still not illegal to link to copyrighted material in Sweden. There are several precedental legal cases from the past years that establishes this. And this is the main point.
Re:Strange political power (Score:4, Informative)
Re:come on, let's face it (Score:5, Informative)
And here's where you're wrong and trolling:
We're not talking about the DMCA, we're talking about basic theft.
NO, NO, NO, WRONG.
Theft is when YOU HAVE SOMETHING, SOMEONE ELSE TAKES IT, and YOU NO LONGER HAVE IT.
This is copyright infringement. It is NOT the same thing as theft. In a way, the copyright owner has something, someone else takes (an exact replica of) it, but the copyright owner STILL HAS IT.
It is not as simple as "reduce the problem down to something you can understand and digest easily", and "repeat it often enough, it becomes true". You can't make a simple analogy out of this; it is not a simple problem. Attempt to understand it. Bring yourself to it's level; not vice versa. This works for all complex problems, be it micro v. macro kernel, evolution v. creation, pro-choice v. pro-life, etc. Elevate your understanding.
~Wx
The Pirate Party (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy. (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, no political power (Score:5, Informative)
I am Swedish and I don't think that TPB has had much influence at all, laws and attitudes would have been just the same if this was an organization outside Sweden. My guess is that the presence of the organisation is simply reflecting current attitudes in general in Sweden today. It is notable that a minister in the socialdemocratic government downloaded mp3s, burned them to CD, and gave it to friend as a birthday present [aftonbladet.se] (Swedish article) already in 2000, without seeing any wrong with it.
An explanation to this phenomenon could be a tradition of relatively strong consumer protection laws (and traditions), and that the "personal use" clauses in copyright have always been defended here.
Official statement from the Pirate Party... (Score:3, Informative)
Here is my very rough NON-OFFICIAL translation:
"PRESS RELEASE
For immidiate publication
31 may 2006
For more information, see party webpage at http://www.piratpartiet.se/ [piratpartiet.se] or contact Rickard Falkvinge, +46733555293
The Pirate Party critizises the police for illegitimate intrusion
Swedish police has today taken all the servers of The Pirate Bay into custody, along with the servers of a number of other unrelated web hotel customers. The police chose to do this despite the fact that the services provided by the world's largest bittorrent tracker has been deemed fully legal in Sweden.
The police means, according to an operator of the site, that the police wants to test the legality of the activities.
"Which company would have accepted this treatment?", says Rickard Falkvinge, party leader of the Pirate Party. "Which Company would have accepted that the police arrived and ceased all company activity, before proven guilty of crime?. In this case the Pirate Bay has not commited any crime. They are disliked by large american media interests, that is true. But it is not a crime to be disliked, and definately not a reason for the swedish police to enter and shut down one of the worlds' largest communities for youth people."
"This is exactly the kind of raids that the Pirate Party wants to stop", concludes Rickard. "When the society sends the police on its youth population because they listen to music and watches movies, then it is not the youth that are wrong. Then it is the society that has to do better."
About the Pirate Party:
The Pirate Party is the largest of the new parties for the national elections in Sweden 2006. The party was founded 1 january this year and promotes an open information society, shared culture, and protected private life.
English quotes from Swedish police, Pirate Party (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Voting as a message (Score:1, Informative)
Furthermore, governments in a country that uses porportional representation are typically coalition governments. The few top parties get seats in offices, making concessions to each other on grounds of control within the government. A 20% control could in fact, be a very large chunk of the government, especially in countries where there are many sucessful parties.
Re:Blog updated, (Score:2, Informative)
PRESSRELEASE
For immediate release
31 may 2006
Police tricked by movie industry to shut down The Pirate Bureau
Today the police carried out a razzia against The Pirate Bay, the world's largest Bittorrent-tracker. The site have for several years been a gathering point for culture-interested people all over the world. Everything from homeproduced papers to obscure Japanese music to Eurovision-videos have been spread using Bittorrent-technology.
The servers themselves have never contained any illegal material. The torrent-files, links that people use to connect to each other and transfer the material, only contains text that is hardly copyrighted.
"The Antipirate Bureau have obviously mislead the police in this case" says Tobias Andersson at The Pirate Bureau. "It seems like they have convinced IT-incompetent policemen that the servers are filled with copyrighted material. This is a serious misuse of tax money."
"Meanwhile, several other sites on nearby servers have also been confiscated. This is the most serious escapade. The Antipirate Bureau have obviously convinced the police to shut down their antagonists, The Pirate Bureau, while their at it."
"The Pirate Bureau have for 3 years worked for an open debate on copyright and patent laws and questions. We are very upset that the movie industry does not date to participate in this debate, but instead wants to trick politicians and police into criminalize opponents and a huge part of the Swedish population."
"Of course this means nothing in practice for filesharers around the world. There are thousands of other sites and networks for them to get what they want. People just change place. Filesharing is like a hydra, if you cut of one head two new ones will soon grow out."
The Pirate Bureau started in the summer of 2003 to focus on and discuss copyright topics. The Pirate Bureau means that copyright in many aspects have played put their role, and instead of protecting artists blocks creativity and feed a lucky few. Since the start, about 60 000 members have registered at the site where discussions and idea sharing take place in forums. The Pirate Bureau have also given talks in the parliament, created campaigns and started the world's largest Bittorrent-tracker, ThePirateBay.org
Re:Do something about it (Score:2, Informative)
You are absolutely right, this is great publicity for piracy and piracy organizations. And we can make sure that even more persons hear about this, and make people understand just how many persons there are that care about this question and want the pirate bay to stay up. Here are some e-mail and postal addresses to the Swedish police, the anti piracy bureau (a swedish lobby organization like the riaa), and some important swedish politic organizations. If you're Swedish please pick a few of these and email/post a message and tell them what you think about this. Or even if you're not, do it anyway. It can't hurt. You can make a difference!
If you're worried about åäö in the postal adresses, just use aao, it will get trought.
The Goverment (postal): Sveriges riksdag 100 12 Stockholm Sweden
Important Politicians: Göran Persson Fredrik Reinfeldt Lars Leijonborg Göran HÃgglund Lars Ohly Maud Olofsson Peter Eriksson Maria Wetterstrand
Political Organizations (postal): Socialdemokratiska partistyrelsen 105 60 Stockholm Sweden Moderaterna Box 2080 103 12 Stockholm Sweden Folkpartiet Box 6508 Drottninggatan 97 1tr 113 83 Stockholm Sweden Kristdemokraterna Box 2373 103 18 Stockholm Sweden Centerpartiet Box 2200 103 15 Stockholm Sweden Miljöpartiet de Gröna Prästgatan 18 A Box 2136 103 14 Stockholm Sweden
The Anti Piracy Bureau: Postal Adress: Antipiratbyrån S:t Eriksgatan 117A Box 23021 104 35 Stockholm Sweden Swedish police (different adresses are for different districts):
e-mail: polismyndigheten@blekinge.police.se
polismyndigheten@dalarna.police.se
polismyndigheten@gotland.police.se
polismyndigheten@gavleborg.polisen.se
polismyndigheten@halland.police.se
polismyndigheten@jamtland.police.se
polismyndigheten@jonkoping.police.se
polismyndigheten@kalmar.police.se
polismyndigheten@kronoberg.police.se
polismyndigheten@norrbotten.police.se
polismyndigheten.skane@polisen.se
polismyndigheten@stockholm.polisen.se
polismyndigheten.sodermanland@polisen.se
post@uppsala.polisen.se polisen@varmland.police.se
polismyndigheten@vasterbotten.police.se
polismyndigheten@vasternorrland.police.se
polismyndigheten@vastmanland.polisen.se
polismyndigheten@vastragotaland.polisen.se
polismyndigheten@orebro.police.se
polismyndigheten@ostergotland.police.se
rikspolisstyrelsen@polisen.se
skl@skl.police.se postals
(the first one is the national one, so if you send do several of them, always send to this): Rikspolisstyrelsen Box 12256 102 26 Stockholm Sweden
SKL - Statens Kriminaltekniska Laboratorium 581 94 Linköping Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Blekinge lÃn Box 315 371 25 Karlskrona Sweden
Polismyndigheten Dalarna Box 739 791 29 Falun Sweden
Polismyndigheten Gotland Box 1153 621 22 Visby Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Gävleborgs län Box 625 801 26 Gävle Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Hallands län Box 1031 301 10 Halmstad Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Jämtlands län Box 707 831 28 Östersund Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Jönköpings län Box 618 551 18 Jönköping Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Kalmar län Box 91 391 21 Kalmar Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Kronobergs län Box 1211 351 12 Växjö Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Norrbotten Box 50135 973 24 Luleå Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Skåne 205 90 Malmö Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Stockholms län 106 75 Stockholm Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Södermanlands län Box 348 631 05 Eskilstuna Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Uppsala län Box 3007 750 03 Uppsala Sweden
Polismyndigheten Värmland Box 157 651 05 Karlstad Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Västerbottens län Box 463 901 09 Umeå Sweden
Polismyndigheten i Västernorrlands län Box 720 851 21 Sundsvall Sweden
Polismyndigheten i
An alternative to pharmaceutical patents (Score:4, Informative)
I apologize for not having a more complete translation of our proposal ready, but this is the basic idea.
At least in Europe, over 80% of the pharma companies' revenues come from the government (since we have universal medical coverage). The pharma companies claim that they have to charge several times more than the production costs in order to fund research. But they only spend 15% of their revenues on research. Most of the money they receive from the government actually goes to marketing (around 50%) and profit (around 15%).
If the government would fund research and the buying of the pills separately, the total bill would drop by at least 50%, since there would be no need for the excessive marketing any more. And there would be no need to keep the research results blocked by patents, since they would have been paid for already.
So there would be no need to threaten third world countries with economic sanctions just because they try to do what they can to provide AIDS medicine to their own population.
Re:The Political Pirate Party (Score:4, Informative)
GPL uses copyright protection specifically to stop commercial interests from, say, enhancing the Linux kernel and selling the result as a closed source product. Without copyright protections, the commercial company COULD do this with impunity.
Personally, I agree that current copyright law is ridiculous, but 5 years seems way too short. I would argue for something like 40 or 50 years. There are plenty of examples of creative work that was a dud on initial release, but became a cult favorite a decade later... or creative work that was the product of decades of work, from a creator who would not be able to "just do more" to keep an income stream once copyright ended. We want to support these kinds of "master works" or "life's work" projects, not say, "sorry, but your 5 years is up -- if the word is still spreading, hey; sucks to be you".
Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy. (Score:5, Informative)
Sweden, until rather recently, had one of the more enlightened copyright laws around. It explicitly required authorisation only for *commercial* reproduction. Making a copy of a cd, book, or whatever and giving it to your friends was never illegal.
Well, of course once the *AA found out about that they had a tizzy fit, and funnelled an unknown, but apparently substantial amount of money to Sweden, funding the Antipirat Byrån and some other organisations, as well as bribing lots of politicians. They haven't had the kind of success they've been hoping for, but they did manage to change the law to prohibit unauthorised non-commercial copying. A rather unpopular move with the voting public, I might add, which is increasingly resentful of the swedish politicians who have a pattern of voting in stuff that's unpopular with the citizenry but popular with wealthy foreign lobbyists. Politicians are traditionally held in VERY high regard in Sweden, and there's an overwhelming tradition of people trusting them, viewing them as experts, and assuming that if they do something like this they must know best. That tradition has been quickly eroding, by incidents like this. Before that law was hustled through in the back rooms, very few people were actively thinking about the issue. Afterwards, a significant movement started to form and demand that their liberty be restored.
Anyhow, they did manage to technically make filesharing illegal there, and there was a test case a few months back. It was reported that, basically, if the court didn't impose a fairly harsh sentence, the police would not enforce the law again. As I recall, the court did not go mad, and therefore it was widely assumed afterwards this was essentially a dead law. They can, of course, write someone up for it if they happen to see it, but they cannot, for instance, breach privacy laws to get your IP over such a minor offense, so in practice it's nearly unenforceable.
I'm guessing this raid will backfire horribly for those behind it. Unless I've horribly misunderstood the law there (and not just me, the pirate bay folks, who have significant legal respresentation and counsel available) hosting the torrent files themselves is still completely legal. If a court winds up agreeing with that assessment, the pirate bay should wind up getting everything returned along with an apology and a nice fat cheque. And I don't mean that in the sense I would in a similar circumstance in the US - it should happen but it never will - I mean it's very likely. The falsely accused are normally compensated for their trouble there. If that happens, it should be rather impossible for this to be spun away - it will become another police scandal coming at a time when the police have way too many already.
So far, every effort the *AA has made in Sweden has backfired in terms of public opinion. The more attention they draw to the issue, the more support for liberty seems to arise. Won't be surprised if that happens again, although I note today that the hacks at dn.se, the nations largest newspaper, are desperately trying to spin this the other way. But then again, they've been doing that all along...
Re:TEXT if slashdotted (Score:2, Informative)
The problem here is that the server room was designated a skyddsområde (protected area), as it contains business critical infrastructure and business secrets. In this case, a court order is indeed needed, and generally quite hard to obtain.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I do have a law degree (jur kand) and work as an assistant legal advisor at a Swedish company.
Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy. (Score:3, Informative)
Defending minorities and special interests is a critical part of democracy. Ever heard the phrase "tyranny of the majority?" The minority's interests shouldn't be put ahead of those of the majority, but they should be heard, and not interfered with if they don't conflict.
Besides, special interests often have something important to say to the majority. Sometimes they even grow into the majority. Sometimes they already ARE. If properly informed about the issue, how many voters in Sweden do you think would agree with outlawing DRM, instituting or maintaining fair use and generally telling major American media companies to back off?
Yes, the Pirate Party takes a more extreme position, but I expect their goal is to pull more mainstream parties in the direction they'd like, rather than to actually form a government. In Canada your federally funded (and allowed) advertising budget is a function of how much of the popular vote you got in the last election. The Green party isn't likely to ever form an actual government but they DID get enough of the vote to get funding for the next election. That sends two messages. They can advertise directly and reach more people AND the major political parties will see that a significant number of voters are concerned about the issue.
Re:TEXT if slashdotted (Score:1, Informative)
More info, in Swedish, can be found here: http://www.ab.lst.se/templates/InformationPage___
Re:Legal? (Score:2, Informative)
However, this provision was removed in the July 2005 reform to conform with the EUCD (by adding provision 2 to the first paragraph as follows "except in cases where the communication occurs in such a way that members of the public may access the sound recordings from a place and at a time individually chosen by them").
This didn't fortunately affect the situation with links or other references to information stored elsewhere, because the "making available" definition was clarified in Article 2 so that linking can no longer be considered either "public performance" or "communication to the public", in accordance with the definitions in EUCD, so it falls completely outside the scope of the copyright law. Only if there is some collusion between the persons who actually make the material available from under their control, and the person who makes an online reference to it, can it be prosecuted for aiding and abetting.
So basically your precedent is now completely irrelevant and you are also wrong on the face of the text of the law and the preliminary works.
mod parent down - incorrect facts (Score:3, Informative)
You're misinformed. Yes, you were allowed to give your closest friends a copy. There was a levy fee on the media because of it though. And you couldn't give ALL your friends a copy (disregard the typical slashdotter with 6 friends).
If you spread copies widely earlier, it was just as illegal as it is now
Re:This is the sort of publicity you can't buy. (Score:3, Informative)
No offence, but you should really look at what typical recording contracts actually say before launching into a rant like that.
Hint: if you're part of a newbie band and things go to hell, you're probably going to get stuck with most of the expenses, not the record label.
People around here need to stop associating defending the principle of intellectual property with defending the big record labels, who are for the most part the scum of the earth.
Re:Vikings are Norwegion (Score:3, Informative)
Those pirates are screwed.
Re:An alternative to pharmaceutical patents (Score:3, Informative)
Wait... so if the Indian and Chinese can produce the drugs cheaper than Europe (with appropriate duty, of course - drugs companies in Europe pay European taxes, drugs coming in from outside Europe should have a duty charged to make up for those taxes) - why shouldn't they? Why does this hurt the pharmaceutical companies? They'd be getting money directly from the government (which, in any case, they do now anyway - find me a drug that didn't have its origins in a university hospital and I'll find a thousand others that did) for the research whether they sell the drug or not.
Any pharmaceutical company in Europe will have a few years head start on foreign companies, because they've got experience with making the drug - that, and they'll also have the quality control stuff out of the way. Presumedly foreign drugs would also have to have quality controls to ensure that they're equivalent to European-produced drugs. And when/if the other countries can start making the drugs cheaper, then it's time to move on.
I have to agree that splitting research and production of pharmaceuticals is probably an ideal way to go. Drugs should be cheap if they're cheap to make. Morally, it's just wrong to keep them expensive to pay for new, future drugs.
And believe it or not, financially, it's probably wrong, as well. In the long run, it's easy to believe that an economy could be healthier with universal, cheap health care due to the increased productivity and lifespans of the population.
I am sure that the Chinese and Indians would be happy to have you pay for all the research so that they can knock-off your products for pennies on the dollar when the research actually turns up a useful new drug.
Again, I say: who cares if they do? If they can actually make the drugs cheaper, then the European economy saves money, especially if the proper duties are assessed, because the European people end up paying less for the drugs.
One company in Europe that makes the drug might get hurt, but really, whose fault is that? Why should it be the government's job to protect a bad business model?