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Italian Pirate Bay ruling gets mixed review
The Industry Standard The highest court overturned an earlier ruling by the Bergamo appeal court that unblocked the access of Italian Internet users to The Pirate Bay site on the … Italian Appeals Court Explains Decision to Block the Pirate BayZeropaid Italy's FIMI Welcomes Pirate Bay RulingBillboard Business News Italian Pirate Bay Ruling Gets Mixed ReviewCIO |
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The Pirate Bay and its founders have been on a legal roller coaster ride this year. Directly or indirectly they have been involved in a dozen court cases, most notably the trial in which four people associated with the site were sentenced to one year in jail and hefty fines.
Despite this unfavorable verdict the site remains online, as it adapts to become a torrent portal that is less likely to be shut down.
In yet another attempt to close the site, two of the site’s founders were ordered by the Stockholm District Court to stop operating the site in October, facing fines of $71,000 each if they choose not to comply.
The two founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, both decided to appeal the verdict, and the Appeal Court has now announced that it will take on the case.
Gottfrid argued that the district court lacks the technical skills that are required, “…which is devastating to a case which is so technically complicated.” Fredrik further said that both he and Gottfrid have been living outside Sweden for a long time, adding that The Pirate Bay is no longer hosted in Sweden either.
Aside from the technical difficulties, the legal authorities may also find that it is pretty much impossible to prove that the two are actually working on the site, which is required to impose the fines. The Appeal Court will review these and other issues in the upcoming appeal.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
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As the world heads deeper into the information age, it becomes increasingly critical that information held by organizations on private individuals is handled in a secure and responsible manner, and used only for limited purposes.
Taking the responsibility for ensuring this happens in Sweden is the Data Inspection Board, a public authority which can audit companies and organizations holding personal information.
The Board’s connections to file-sharing go back notably to 2005, when it ruled that the activities of the Swedish anti-piracy bureau (Antipiratbyrån) went against the Personal Data Act. It decided that since IP addresses can be tied to a specific person, only the government were allowed to store that type of information in criminal cases.
Since then Antipiratbyrån has appealed the decision twice and lost, but fortunately for them, an exception was made in the IPRED legislation which now allows organizations to collect data when it precedes a legal claim, i.e suing file-sharers.
However, while anti-piracy groups are allowed to collect data, they have to comply with a set of standards enforced by the Data Inspection Board. To this end, two lawyers and an IT security expert will today head to Antipiratbyrån’s offices in Stockholm to conduct an audit.
“We want to see how the records of suspected file sharers are being handled,” said Jonas Agnvall, a lawyer at the Data Inspection Board.
Part of the reason for the inspections is to check if the anti-piracy group has changed the way it handles information following the introduction of IPRED in April this year. The legislation was widely feared by Swedish file-sharers but thus far has only led to a single case, which was thrown out by the Appeal Court.
IFPI chief executive Lars Gustafsson offered assurances in September that law suits against suspected file-sharers were very close, but noted that his group were biding their time to see how the first IPRED case panned out. As you’ve just read, that case collapsed.
Although it has taken no action against file-sharers thus far, on Monday IFPI will get a similar Data Inspection Board audit, but according to comments made to SvD, the group says it holds no data, since it outsources the task to other organizations, most probably companies like Denmark’s DtecNet.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
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On April 17th, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available.’ The Court sentenced the defendants to one year in prison and a fine of $905,000 each.
While awaiting the appeal that was announced immediately after the verdict, The Pirate Bay continued to operate as if nothing had happened. In the background, however, both the defense and prosecution teams were preparing for the appeal which was scheduled to take place next month.
The timing of the appeal was not ideal for several of the defendants and their lawyers. They consequently tried to postpone it to a later date but this request was initially denied. However, thanks to concerns about the objectivity of some of the judges involved, the appeal has been rescheduled after all.
“I just came out of a meeting where we decided to postpone,” Appeal Court Council Ulrika Ihrfelt said this morning.
The reason for the delay are the bias accusations against two of the main judges appointed to the appeal. Both judges have ties to pro-copyright groups and last week defense lawyer Samuelsson announced that he will take the bias question to the Supreme Court. This, after his initial request failed at the Appeal Court.
Samuelsson now has to file his complaints at the Supreme Court within four weeks, and because the appeal is supposed to start close to the end of this deadline the Appeal Court decided that it was best to postpone the case.
No official date has been set for the delayed appeal but according to Ulrika Ihrfelt it will take till at least summer 2010 before the Court has time to handle the case. Until then it will be business as usual for The Pirate Bay, providing that the operators can solve all the technical problems they’ve run into during the past days.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
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The first court case testing the new IPRED anti-piracy legislation has proven the law is not the silver bullet the anti-piracy lobby hoped it would be.
The law is intended to make it easier for copyright holders to obtain the personal details of alleged file-sharers from ISPs, but the ISPs are not handing information over without a fight.
This April, five book publishers handed a request to a local court for information on the owner of an FTP-server that allegedly stored more than 2000 audio books. Although it was a private server and the audio books couldn’t have been made available to the general public, the court ordered the ISP Ephone to hand over the details of the person behind the IP address.
In a response to the negative decision Ephone consulted its customers, asking them whether they should appeal the case or not. Of the 20,000 customers who responded, a massive 99% were in favor of an appeal, so Ephone duly took the case to the Appeal Court.
Yesterday the Appeal Court announced its verdict, which turned out to be a win for the ISP and the alleged copyright infringer. The Appeal Court nullified the earlier decision of the District Court against the ISP, and ruled that Ephone does not have to hand over the details of the FTP owner to the book publishers.
The Appeal Court argued that, even though the FTP server contained copyrighted works, probable cause for copyright infringement had not been proven. Since the server in question required login credentials there was no distribution to the public, the Appeal Court said.
The decision of the Appeal Court was received with huge disappointment by the book publishers, but welcomed by Ephone and the majority of its customers. Still, this decision may not be the end of the first IPRED case as it may still be appealed at the Supreme Court.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
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The Appeal Court announced today that lay judge Fredrik Niemelä has been disqualified from the upcoming Pirate Bay appeal. Unlike the previous calls to replace people involved in the Pirate Bay trial, this one came from the music industry, not the defense team.
Last week music industry body IFPI requested Niemelä to be taken off the case, since he is connected to the music streaming application Spotify which is partly owned by the major record labels. This request was soon backed by movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted. “There should not be any doubt in this case,” she said in a response.
The Court today agreed with this assessment and disqualified Niemelä because he holds stock options in Spotify. This despite the fact that Niemelä himself denied a conflict of interest. The decision by the Appeal Court is unanimous and can not be appealed.
The question remains why the music industry was so eager to have this lay judge removed, since they usually keep quiet when the person in question supports their case. However, as we’ve pointed out before, there could be more to this lay judge issue than initially meets the eye.
Niemelä’s involvement with Spotify was limited to the technical side. In fact, he is a tech savvy programmer who co-owns a streaming technology patent along with the original developer of uTorrent and knows the ins and outs of BitTorrent.
Instead of having a bias towards the music industry, as IFPI wanted the Appeal Court to believe, he might actually be one of the rare candidates who knows how BitTorrent really works. Judging from the plaintiff’s discrediting of other tech experts in the previous trial, it might be that IFPI’s true motivation to remove Niemelä was not that humble.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
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