Since little information is available in English, here are some points of clarification:

-The main charge was "aiding copyright violation". The decision of the court is mainly based on the fact that TPB did nothing to prevent it and that they in every way advertised that you could download copyrighted stuff on their site. The fact that this can be done with Google or any other search engine is beside the point according to the court. Google cooperates at least to a limited extent with copyright holders while TPB made a point of pissing them off.

- According to the court indifference to the possibility of the copyright violations occurring is not enough as an argument to let them off the hook. This is not so much a controversial point in the guilty verdict but a very controversial one when it comes to sentencing.

-According to Swedish law you can be found guilty of aiding even if the perpetrators of the main crime (i.e copyright violations) is unknown and the full extent of the crime is unknown as well.

-According to the court information provider neutrality as defined in among other things the EU's e-commerce law does not apply to TPB. Their main argument is that TPB was not a general service provider but a search service largely aimed at facilitating downloading copyrighted material.

-The most controversial point is the sentencing. The basic question is if the three specific persons could really be sentenced for crimes that they did not and could not have had information about (each individual download). The court's answer is yes and the reasoning behind it is fairly vague and general in nature. When it comes to the damages the reasoning is rather strange: Basically they say the following: The industry claims X million Euros in directly lost profits. This is clearly absurd as not all who download would have actually bought the product in question. So we'll split the difference and put the damages to X/2. X/2 turned out to be 46 million Swedish crowns. (€5 million)

Apart from the questionable reasoning one should put into context that a premeditated murder will in Sweden cost you on average 5 years in prison and 100,000 (~€10.7k) crowns in damages to the relatives. So although the guilty verdict of the court may be reasonable, the sentencing is very extreme by Swedish standards. As a rule damages are never in the millions and the idea is that the guilty party should have a chance to actually pay them. The sentence of 46 million crowns in damages is simply outside any Swedish legal practice.

Perhaps not all that unreasonable. The Geforce 3 was launched in 2001 and was the first real GPU that could do floating point operations.

2001: Geforce 3, 2.6 MFLOPs
2009: Geforce GX295: 1.78 GFLOPs

That's a factor of 680 in six years. Ok, the 295 is a dual GPU solution, but Nvidia is set to release the nv300 series this year that will have twice the number of cores. So he's actually predicting that the increase in computing power will be smaller than in the previous seven year period.

I'm not quite sure what it is, but it looks like that there is some government regulation in the US that makes the situation so bad. Compared to what we have in Sweden, the US mobile phone network is abysmal. In the US networks have poor coverage, high prices and long contracts that lock you in to one provider for a long time. If you thing it is geography, think again - Sweden has about the same population density as the US. We have some regions that are relatively densely populated but large parts of the country are not. Yet you can basically go to the point furtherest from civilization and you'll still have full 3G coverage.

Now to my point: Sweden has almost no regulations of the mobile phone market. Although we have a government that is rather regulation-happy, mobile networks and internet providers have been excepted. We have a large number of mobile providers (I would guess something like ten times more mobile providers per capita than the US) so you can pick and choose. Prices are low and coverage and speeds are good. All that is accomplished without any interference from the government (there has been some interference from the EU regarding roaming charges, but that's a different story).

Another example are mobile networks in Africa. Guess which country in Africa has the best and cheapest mobile networks? You probably guessed wrong: It's Somalia. Apparently mobile network companies thrive under anarchy.
So, as it seems to me, less government regulations of mobile networks seems to produce better results for the consumers. The question is what kind of government involvement is making problems in the US? Or is it something else?

This is due to the neo-Liberal tenet that people are entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another, the only way they should be able to express themselves is through the free market.[1] The point being that these raves were legal, but were not taking part in government-approved capitalist venues, people there were not consuming government-approved drugs (such as alcohol) and even more galling: they went against the principle that people are essentially selfish.

Wow indeed. You have been watching too many Adam Curtis movies. Even taking that into account it is still remarkable how many errors you can put into a few sentences.

Neo-liberals (or libertarians as they are called in the US) are as a rule against laws banning drugs. Their main tenet is that individual liberties should be maximized and government influence minimized. So they are generally vehemently to government regulations - be it of drugs or of the market. Saying that neo-liberals see people as "entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another" is a very slanted and twisted version of the of their core belief: that each individual is an end in himself/herself. Put in other words that your life belongs to you and that nobody has the right to enslave you, be it for the benefit for one other individual or a whole society.

As for raves going "against the principle that people are essentially selfish" - i think it's rather difficult to find a more selfish activity than getting stoned and listening to music that you like. It certainly isn't something that neo-liberals would find offending.

Note: For those of you who haven't seen any Adam Curtis documentaries: He's like Michael Moore, but without the humor and with less fact checking. The documentaries are similar in style and quality to "Moon Hoax" documentaries and have the same ratio of facts to speculation.

In the early 80's when VHS became popular there was a strong movement in Sweden for banning all video imports. The reason cited was that the children would become hooligans at best and mass murderers at worst if they were to exposed to so much violence. Until the early 90's, there were no private TV channels in Sweden. There were two state owned and controlled channels that were very proactive in censoring violence. Movies in theaters were heavily censored as well.

In a way the fear of video was more justified than the fear of video games - there was no prior data on how people react in general when exposed to displays of graphic violence on a regular basis. As it turns out, photorealistic video did not make mass murderers out of the population, so there is really no reason why we should expect the video game generation to be any more violent than the VHS generation.

The video ban in Sweden? It was never introduced, but not for a lack of trying. The reason why it was scrapped was because a ban would have violated some trade agreements. It is a rather remarkable human trait - the desire to stop *other* people from doing something they like. Note that it's always stopping others for their own good. You'll never find somebody saying: Please pass this ban so that I'll stop doing that thing that I know I shouldn't be doing.

Stockab has fibers connected to municipal housing. That's about 20% of all fiber, and they cost more as both ISP and stockab get paid. The reason why it's so cheap is because of fierce competition between the different broadband providers. There was zero regulation and great tax benefits during the IT-boom era which led to a large number of broadband providers. That made a huge difference.

I pay (in Stockholm) about $7/month for a 100 Mbit connection and that's through privately owned fiber, not the municipal one. It also varies from city to city. In the case of Västerås (another Swedish city) they did actually build a full municipal fiber network and through laws and regulations made it a monopoly (the fibers, not the service). Prices there are about $30-40/month for a 20 Mbit connection.

Actually, with the latest incarnation of C#, it gets much more compact. I don't know how to get indentation to work within the ecode tag but you should still get the idea:

class foo
{
public int dontTouch { get; set; }
}

class bar
{
public void someMethod()
{
foo ourFoo = new foo() { dontTouch = 5 };
int asdf = ourFoo.dontTouch;
}
}