The unanimous verdict in #spectrial is that all four are collectively found guilty. The Court went on the Prosecutors line.
According to the Judge who gave a press conference after the verdict had been released, the four Frederik Neij (tiamo), Gottfrid Svartholm Varg (anakata), Peter Sunde (brokep) and Carl Lundström have worked as a team, they know that material that was copyrighted when it went through The Pirate Bay tracker. This is why they were found guilty to have assisted in copyright infringement.
The Court decided the crime was severe and handed out a one year prison sentence and damages of 30 million SEK / USD 3,5 million. This level of damages are almost never seen in the Swedish Court system as they want to keep the damages down.
The Judge said that they used a conservative view when calculating the damages. The Court agreed and used the same method presented by the Plaintiffs for the Nordic Movie Companies and dismissed the US Movie companies method as too uncertain.
The Judge also said that The Pirate Bay was a commercial enterprise. Since Finance is my background, I found it very frightening that the Court has gone on the Prosecutors word of this as absolutely no evidence were presented. No bank statement of the The Pirate Bay, no company accounts, no tax returns. The main piece was a signed agreement that was not executed upon and personal bank statements. This surely must be overthrown in the higher Courts.
We have to see this verdict as a trial run for the major Court cases. Learn where things went wrong and how to clarify the facts better. It is all about making our case understood by the higher Court. What we take for granted, they have not got understanding of. We need to improve our arguments to ensure that it gets received correctly by the members of the Courts.
The Judge also said the Court only focus was on the case presented and took not into any consideration of the principals implications that is attached to this verdict. I have to agree with this point as it is not the lower Courts purpose to set precedent, that should only come from the High Court.
Another point that the Judge said – that I can not understand – bit torrent technology is not illegal but was illegal used at The Pirate Bay. I am pretty certain that is what he said but if anyone else could add with more information, I would be grateful!
Judge also said that the main crime had been committed by the users of The Pirate Bay. If this is the case, then why are not they on trial. Surely the main crime should be a priority rather then to look at the ‘assisting’ parties.
read comments (0)Facebook; change because of … ?
Posted by Sofia in NOT happy with
Facebook changed their Homepage tonight (my time GMT) – just in time for SXSW conference. They must be lining up some sort of announcement, I am sure. This change feels like change for the sake of it. I can’t see what benefits this brings me, the user. I miss the clear overview of the fun videos, uploaded photos, comments on other people’s submitted things and all of that. It has been pushed away to somewhere else. The new layout feels every so clumsy.
For status updates and snippets of information, I use Twitter. Twitter has cornered this part in the market, they have the users, the ease of adding interesting people and is the market leader. The updates move quickly and they have the twitter search facility which is superb to catch up what is going on.
Facebook is good on other things such as sharing more personal information and also provides more in depth takes on things. I really like to read the links with comments from others. They are moving away from what they are good at and seems to have Twitter-envy blinding them.
I am sure there is a Facebook group against change formed already but I suspect that they will not take a step back from this change.
I landed in London end of last week and it took some days before I could get some internet juice.
I tried the FON network but that was very flaky. And for some reason no coverage in the mornings. I don’t recommend it. They were happy to charge £15 for 5 day passes but there is no guarantees that you will get internet access all day.
My dear neighbor K kindly let me use her wifi until I get things sorted with BT and Bethere.
Sadly I missed the part where the experts were on the stand on The Pirate Bay #spectrial. After listening to today’s feed, I definitely want to catch up with what Professor Wallis testimony.
Today was the defense turn to making the closing arguments. I tweeted:
The defense team were focused, referred to the law and even handed out source material for the Court’s reference. The lawyer who was the best in a certain area spoke for all 4. The plaintiff’s lawyers were all over the place. The one who mostly got a free ride was Monique Wadsted – in my view all she added was confusion and fried sparrows analogizes.
Yesterday she said an statement that I offended me greatly. In her closing statement she showed her irritation that The Pirate Bay had continued their service despite she and her clients had filed a report at the police. She also she pointed out that there were Court cases in other countries had been against bit torrent sites.
She implied that just because of these two actions The Pirate Bay should have stopped and how dared they defy this?
Never mind that they have not been found guilty of anything in a Swedish Court yet. The best reason I can come up with is that she is saying this because she got paid to do so. Even so, it is an awful statement and those kind of practices does not belong in a democracy.
Only Lundstrom’s lawyer broke rank and pointed the finger at Gottfrid Svartholm Varg as he (allegedly) is one responsible for The Pirate Bay site if one had to be found. It is an conflict when you have more then person as defended in trial. Each lawyer needs to look after his client. In this case, I strongly believe that if they stand *united* the stronger they are. I have mentioned this before, this is a marathon and nothing is going to get won or lost at the first trial. This is where the parties put their cards on the table.
Set the date 17 April 09 at 11am, the Court will publish their judgment.
WordPress 2.7.1 and Live Writer not working well together
Posted by Sofia in NOT happy with
This is my second blog that I have started, my first one under my real name. WordPress and Live Writer used to make my blogging easy so I started where I left off. However, they are not working very well together.
Here is a screen shot of what it looks like when I am typing in Live Writer – not usable frankly:
and when posting the above test, it looks like this on the blog:
and this is now totally unusable.
I upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 today which didn’t go smooth. The new version is a step forward though because in the previous version of WordPress, Live Writer could not collect the settings and blog themes due XML error I believe.
For writing this post, I have drafted it in Live Writer and the copy & paste the htlm into the dashboard to see how that works. This is a short term solution. I have never like writing my blog posts directly in WP Dashboard as I find it visual impairing and in general very limiting.