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 1^st 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 1^st 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.