Friday, April 17, 2009

Sweden Declares War on the Internet


Me, I'm gonna side with the Internet. I've never been more ashamed of being Swedish than today. Just kidding! Or am I?

As you've probably heard, SUPERBLOG!! heroes The Pirate Bay Boyos were convicted today. All four of them, weirdly. Carl Lundström may not be a very nice guy but I listened to the entire two-week trial and it seemed obvious that he has almost nothing to do with TPB. But Lundström is a multi-millionaire so, unlike the rest of them, he could conceivably pay the damages. Could that have something to do with the verdict? Nooo, of course not.

The damages, yeah. 30 million SEK. That's for running a website that facilitated other, unspecified people's file-sharing of a handful of movies, games, and music files. By way of comparison, 30 million SEK is a hundred times the record amount ever awarded a rape victim in Sweden. Oh, and they got one year each in prison.

Of course, this will be appealed to a higher court, and then probably appealed again, to the Swedish Supreme Court. And by the time this case is resolved once and for all, file-sharing will be obsolete and we will all have information automatically BEAMED INTO OUR BRAINS.

But right now, Peter Sunde is our Rosa Parks!

3 comments:

KM said...

From space.

Somebodyiusedtoknow said...

i love TPB and use it all the time. its a sad thing to hear. why are you always trying to bring me down?

KM said...

Okay, I'll try to bring you up:

The judgment, if it stands, will probably not take legal effect for several years, and TPB as a website won't close down anyway. The servers are in other countries.

So it's just a symbolic victory for the Copyright Mafia, a "fuck you" from the Swedish government to all citizens under 40, and a free ticket into the European Parliament for the Pirate Party in June. Yay!