Pirate Bay Verdict: Why Does SWEDEN Persecute its Citizens?

To kiss up to the United States of course, but read on.

Boston Tea Party: about taxation w/o representation. What about Microsoft Tax?

A way to support The Pirate Bay 4

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

Clayton Hallmark
Homepage: http://www.alpha-400.com

Comments

Hide the following 9 comments

thieving scumbags

19.04.2009 11:25

I'm not sure how you make the leap from piratebay to the IMF, WTO

If you don't want to pay for microsoft-like products, just use linux / openoffice etc instead. No one is forcing you to use microsoft products. If no-one bought them, they'd go out of business. But people are, so people must be happy enough to pay for them.

i'd glad the piratebay lot have got the big fines. Not to sure about the prison sentence though.
They aren't shiny white knights, they are parasites who think pirating stuff is 'cool' whilst they profit from it. Leeches, no different to fat bankers leeching off others in my eyes.

Neddy

@Neddy: Microsoft's monopoly is forcing you to use them

19.04.2009 22:47

Microsoft effectively forces people to use their products via their monopoly. People are brought up in schools and at work to use Microsoft, all their friends use Microsoft, so they naturally do too. But MS built up their monopoly via illegal anti-competitive practices, which they have been convicted of several times. And they just laugh at the fines.

You'd have to be a moron to be happy to pay Microsoft for their products.

I think copyright should be abolished and people like the Pirate Bay crew are helping bring this closer.

Like it or not, most people online get most of their music and films for free these days. If the industries don't like it, tough shit.

The real leeches are the "artists" who churn out some marketed piece of crap and then expect to sit around on their arses getting paid every time someone listens to it. Fuck em, they can earn their living like everyone else.

anon

!Viva Copyleft!

20.04.2009 14:14

Neddy...you don't seem to understand how P2P works. The only way they could make money from the Pirate Bay would be to charge a subscription for use, whereas in reality like Indymedia in fact they don't even expect people to register in order to use their index.

In other news, not only is copyright being broken but there's framework already in place to ensure it remains broken - look up the Creative Commons non-commercial licenses.

Kaze no Kae
mail e-mail: alanstevenson@hotmail.co.uk
Homepage: http://kazenokae.blogspot.com

Liberation of creative works

20.04.2009 14:23

Also, the idea that internet piracy is theft is frankly stupid. I speak as a guitarist, songwriter, programmer and author when I say this, and any worthy artist would like nothing better than for their product to be available unconditionally to anyone who wanted it. Its the middleman - the record companies, the publishers, the distributors, the film studios, the cinema companies - its the middleman who steal creative works, by blackmail, by the threat of eternal obscurity, and they jealously guard their plunder, as demonstrated by this verdict. Internet pirate groups such as the Pirate Bay are the heirs of Robin Hood, liberating art from its copyright prison and delivering it to the people for whom it was intended.

Kaze no Kae
mail e-mail: alanstevenson@hotmail.co.uk
Homepage: http://kazenokae.blogspot.com

@alan

21.04.2009 12:27

>> Neddy...you don't seem to understand how P2P works. The only way they could make money from the Pirate Bay would be to charge a subscription for use,

I think you don't understand how PPC revenue works. Their site is covered with it. And the amount of traffic their site gets is massive (ranked #107) . An example: I've just checked one of their merchant ads (the PKR poker one) with their affiliate network. According to their stats, the average EPHC (earnings per hundred clicks) for PKR generates £122.82. They have also just posted a blog entry telling people to buy their t-shirts for 25euros each. They make money. And if a court is ordering them to pay two and half million pounds in damages, where do the court think they can get hold of that kind of cash, if they didn't get it from profits? They certainly wont have 2.5mil from their day jobs will they?

I'm sure they got big costs to cover, but I'm also sure it would be suicidal to admit you are making any profits from something that has a foundation based upon illegal activities. They'd open themselves up to all kinds of legal liabilities.

>> Also, the idea that internet piracy is theft is frankly stupid. I speak as a guitarist, songwriter, programmer and author when I say this, and any worthy artist would like nothing better than for their product to be available unconditionally to anyone who wanted it

Any artist (music, photographer, etc) CAN give something away for free quite easily. Just stick it on a website for download and you'll done. Takes 5minutes. There is nothing difficult about that. Or stick on p2p filesharing yourself. If you wanted it to be freely available, the last place to go to is a publisher - they would just put the phone down on you.

Copyright is for people who DON'T want to give stuff away, it is for people who want to make a revenue from their work. If people take their work to a publisher, you can be pretty sure that they don't want to give it away for free.

Another thing to think about:
If there was no copyright, people would just blatantly reproduce CD / DVDs and sell them at the market, keeping 100% of the money for their own pockets. A dodgy backstreet seller is not going to give any cut to the artists.

neddy

The Winner Stands Alone

23.04.2009 14:59

'The Pirate Coelho supports Pirate Bay!!!' -- Paulo Coelho

The Winner Stands Alone, the latest novel by Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (who incidentally supports Pirate Bay), is a scathing attack on the film industry.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/04/427460.html?c=on

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/04/13/from-pirate-coelho-central/

Not only that, he happily makes his material freely available for download.

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/internet-books/

http://piratecoelho.wordpress.com/

No one is suggesting artists should starve in their garrets. What we are seeking is a better system that rewards artists, not one that lets others live off their hard work.

Keith

Conflating Several Issues

23.04.2009 19:36

I think it's unfortunate that this article and the comments to it are conflating several issues around freedom, copyright and monopoly.

An increasing number of people use purely free software -

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html - such as the GNU/Linux operating system on their computers, rather than proprietary offerings from Microsoft or Apple which do not preserve users' freedoms. Free software, particularly the copyleft software from the GNU project, is not without copyright; it is merely available under a liberal license which allows people to share it, but also often prevents people from co-opting it into a non-free work. Groups like Manchester Free Software -

http://manchester.fsuk.org/ exist to promote free software, formats and protocols as a viable alternative to the proprietary world.

It's certainly a fact that Microsoft have been found guilty of abusing their monopoly. They use Digital Restrictions Management technology -

http://defectivebydesign.org/ - like Apple, Sony and others, to lock people into their platforms and products. They abuse the patent system -

http://swpat.ffii.org/ - to freeze competition. These are all issues worth investigating and campaigning on. Outside the computer world, the World Trade Organisation and IMF require developing countries to sign up to the Western "intellectual property" regime to get funding, which leads them to pay through the nose for US-patented brand-name drugs rather than producing cheap generic alternatives.

Many studies have also concluded that copyright violation of music and video encourages and improves sales, and that those who "pirate" are also more likely to purchase. However, much as it's possible to find free alternatives to proprietary software, it's also possible to find creative works whose creators encourage people to share, remix, and redistribute them. Record label Jamendo -

http://www.jamendo.com/ - releases music under Creative Commons licenses, which allow creators a wide range of freedoms to grant with their works, and website CCMixter -

http://www.ccmixter.org/ - encourages remixing each others' works.

Dave Page
Homepage: http://manchester.fsuk.org/

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