Against the US Constitution (quoted below), which -- ask any lawyer -- is still the law of the land.

Americans can ignore the court in Sweden that has just sentenced the four operators of the Pirate Bay search engine to "Download music, movies, games, software!" to 1 year each and to pay $900,000 each to Big Business/Nashville/Hollywood and related interests. The guys certainly intend to defy it. So do I. Watch their gutsy stand made at today's news conference here here http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009epicwinanyhow.php , but be sure to come back here for an AMERICAN rallying cry.

The verdict means very little. For Americans it should be a rallying point -- like England's old Tea Act over which our American forefathers had their Boston Tea Party (in graphic).

As for obeying the verdict, FUH-GET IT! It doesn't apply to us. It is unconstitutional. Furthermore, we can use the IPREDator software at ThePirateBay.org to get around it, to download whatever there is on The Pirate Bay without the Swedish thought police or anyone else being able to know anything about. Go to Pirate Bay  http://thepiratebay.org/ .

Defy! Get your IPREDator software to conceal your ID while you use The Pirate Bay here  http://ipredator.se/ .
Then HAVE THE GUTS TO USE IT, legally of course.

US Constitution -- Use It or Lose It: "To promote the Progress...for limited Times to Authors"

We almost did lose it under old Bush, who called it "just a blankety-blank piece of paper." Ask any lawyer, it is the supreme law of the land in the USA, the fountainhead of all other laws. Even old Bush had to obey it and leave office at the end of his regime.

Ask any lawyer, the Constitution applies to the issues in the Pirate Bay trial. It applies to downloading copyrighted material and patented software, which is what The Pirate Bay offers.

Ask any lawyer, that's what we all have to go by in America. And ask yourself, Who is closer to the Constitution, Pirate Bay or Hollywood? Our law says it is a protected activity "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," and Anders Rydell, the Swede who has written a book about media piracy, says The Pirate Bay is about "the unlimited spreading of culture." That is exactly what the US Constitution intends when in Article I, Section 8, it says that "The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive rights to their respective Writings and Discoveries...."

The Pirate Bay is about "unlimited speading of culture" and the Constitution says "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Ask yourself, Who is standing in the way of "Progress", Microsoft and its fossilized software, or The Pirate Bay? Who has the power to decide these things, Congress, or Big Business and its Federal Circuit court in Washington, its Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and Big Business's Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)?

The whole IP "piracy" thing is lunacy, not piracy. Further down, Article I, Section 8 also gives the right "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas and Offences against the Law of Nations." A few Somalians are pirates. The Pirate Bay, you, and I are not.

Piracy is something committed on the high seas. See? So if you object, contact me at  http://www.alpha-400.com.

So, really, Why does Sweden persecute its citizens?

Because it is being bullied by the United States and its business interests.

Here's how the world really works: The US and its business interests set the agenda for political and economic behavior everywhere.

For the past 30 years or so the agenda has been to produce almost nothing of material substance (see if you can find Made in the USA in Walmart). Instead the idea is to produce immaterial things -- ideas, information, writings, patents, movies, music, financial derivatives (credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, etc) --and get others to give their labor and ores and other material resources in exchange for dollars of dubious, or perhaps no, value. You valorize the ephemeral things you produce by "enclosing" them with patents and copyrights, hopefully creating an important monopoly from which you can extract a Gatesian fortune.

That regime has just failed in the Global Financial Crisis.

But US companies like Intel, Microsoft, recording companies, and Hollywood studios still hold monopolies or oligopolies. They wield their power through the copyrights and patents granted under Article 1, Section 8, theoretically. But how many people know that you couldn't copyright software in the US before 1981 (year of the Diamond v. Diehr ruling)? How many know that Bill Gates's old man, who helped him start Microsoft, is a lawyer? We need to get back to the Constitution in the United States.

Through "world organizations" like the WTO and IMF -- controlled by the United States -- US business interests like Hollywood and Microsoft extend their monopoly power to the world. The interests of US business -- different from those of US citizens, as many are learning -- are backed up by the soft financial power of the US based on the dollar being the world currency (not so soft when it can starve Iraqi children or Latin American workers). The US government has been able to cause financial hardship on nations who ignored the will of its government/businesses. Ultimately, the soft power is backed up by the US military machine.

In today's world, the US financial and military clout seem less formidable -- don't they, somehow?

So if Sweden, China, etc., can't be bullied anymore, why should they comply with the "intellectual property" regime by which the United States appropriates wealth from the rest of the world to maintain a profligate lifestyle that threatens life on Earth?

In a legal, logical, and ethical sense, if the United States is not obeying its own "Law of the Land" in matters of intellectual property, why should anyone else comply -- Sweden, China, you, or I -- with demands and rulings on IP from the US?

The principle opposed in the 1773 Boston Tea Party (dumping of British-owned tea into Boston Harbor as shown in the Currier lithograph) was "taxation without representation." Ever heard of the "Microsoft tax"? You pay it anyway, and your elected representitives in the US, Sweden, etc., did not levy it.

So get a cheap non-Microsoft mini-laptop from Geeks.com here .

Get some "intellectual property" from The Pirate Bay to fill'er up here  http://thepiratebay.org/ , using IPREDator of course.

And get your defiant The Pirate Bay T-shirt here to support the TPB4:  http://www.bytelove.com/partners/kopimi-/-tpb/cat_3.html