Last Straw

If you’re the type who thinks stealing from corporations that extort billions out of the masses so their execs can get rich is, uh, naughty, you should probably stop reading now in case a moral panic is induced.

For those pinko commies and anarchists still reading, please enjoy…

You might have heard about Apple Computer’s recent ascendancy on the back of the iPod, with its coffers filling to over-flowing. Less likely is that you’ve heard of Apple letting loose its dogs on the student owner of Think Secret (a website that specialises in publishing reports and rumours about Apple Computer), and other sites, for talking about future Apple products without Apple’s permission. Naughty boys. In other cases Apple has gone after people who have shared Mac OS X 10.3 (Apple’s previous operating system) with others on the net via Bit Torrent, a fast file sharing technology. Suffice to say Apple has been kicking and stamping it feet, and treading on many a teenage fan in the process.

But that’s the United States, land of the walkover citizen. Turn to Sweden and Apple look to have met their match. The Pirate Bay is a Swedish based Bit Torrent portal and, in the face of Apple’s recent litigation, were the only website in the world (besides maybe China) to list a Bit Torrent of Apple’s latest and greatest Operating System Mac OS X 10.4 (or “Tiger”).

To get a gist of the kind of characters running The Pirate Bay you need look no further than their “Legal threats” page, dedicated to publishing legal threats they have received and their responses to them.

One of my favourites is a geography lesson for Dreamwork’s lawyers:

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe.
Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go fuck yourself.

For more giggles, head to their legal threats page.

Here’s a direct link to their response to Apple Computer’s recent and hollow legal threat.

The party might be moving onto new pastures pretty soon however, the 1st of July to be precise. According to an article on LinuxReview.org new EU “harmonisation” laws will bring an end to Sweden’s sane copyright laws and replace them with something a little more corporate friendly, apparently allowing the RIAA to sue minors and dead people.

Another side effect of the new Swedish laws will mean that many Linux-distributions will be illegal:

The Swedish government will from the same date be forced to prevent a huge number of Linux-distributions as a consequence of the new law which prohibits the sales of software or other tools that can be used to bypass copyright protection. Such protection is found on DVD and ‘CD’ discs. ‘CD’ discs with copy protection are actually not real CD’s at all, the official CD specification from Philips has no room for such protection. This is why modern so-called CDs can not be used in a huge percentage of the CD players sold today. The DVD specification, on the other hand, has built-in protection against copying and therefore also protection against fair use. A DVD can not be used without special software. There are no such legal software available for Linux.

The Movie Industry has numerous times shown that they think Linux-users demand too much when they demand the right to use the DVD discs they have legally bought on their own entertainment systems. Luckily for us, someone quickly managed to create a nice tool that enables fair use of DVD discs on Linux and others non-standard operating systems. The movie industry responded to this by suing the person who made it possible to view my own, legally bought DVDs on my own system. The Norwegian courts dismissed the case and the code for viewing DVD discs on Linux systems are now a standard component in many main-stream Linux-distributions.

This actually means that the sales of Linux-distributions who include media players like Xine and Mplayer will become illegal when the new Swedish Copyright law goes into effect 1st of July 2005.

LinuxReview.org encourages it readers to start using anonymous file-sharing technologies such as I2P and FreeNet, and finishes off with:

There has been many global trials between Freedom Of Speech and Copyright throughout history. Copyright won every round until last years big case of ‘Anonymous Peer To Peer’ versus ‘Big Media Corporations’. The introduction of Freenet (and later I2P) finally ended this struggle. Freedom Of Speech won and the technology found in these program have effectively killed Copyright on the Internet. Copyrights only way of appealing this verdict is to make software that enables users to be anonymous illegal. This would, obviously, be a huge attack on Freedom of Speech and Freedom in general and LinuxReviews strongly encourages our readers to ignore any such law if something like that ever gets passed.

Can’t argue with that.