1.5 years after the Swedish police siezed all servers of Pirate Bay and many more servers from other innocent companies hosted at the same hosting company, Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall has finally presented the legal accusations.
As DN repports: it has taken the police 1.5 years to scan all servers. No copyrighted material whatsoever was found as DN repports: http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=3130&a=737313
Therefore the prosecutor wants to try in court if linking to copyrighted material is illegal.
- Prosecutor Håkan Roswall admitts the law doesen't explicitly forbid it. Therefore the accusation is help to commit copyright infringment. Other countries have choosen to read their law like this he claims. That however is a weak argument because:
- Swedish law is not a commons law based on a jurys verdict.
- Swedish law is not based upon the decissions of the Swedish people, not the Danish people.
Further: How far is the chain of reference supposed to go? A torrent references copyrighted material, then you reference the torrent, then Pirate Bay references the torrent. And the Pirate Bay are criminals? What if someone like me is referencing the Pirate Bays site does it make me a big criminal? And every site that references this site? Is there perhaps an exponential equation that says you owe the music industry <MONEY>*<SCALEFACTOR>^<number of steps to copyrighted material> ?
Another interesting issue legaly is this: Suppose two people rob a bank. A third accomplish is helping out with something. Then the third man is prosecuted and found guilty of helping with the robbery. But then something interesting happens in our scenario: the two robbers is prosecuted but found not guilty. How could we then have a verdict for helping in a criminal act if there were legaly no crininal act in the first place?
This gives the important question: how can we legally have a situation of helping to commit copyright infringment if we have no such convictions in the frist place? Don't we really first need to see the seeders and those referencing the seeders commited first?
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