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  • The Pirate Bay Takes Its Case To The European Court

    The Pirate Bay Takes Its Case To The European Court

    We reported back in February that Sweden’s Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of The Pirate Bay’s founders. The verdict left their jail sentences and fines intact, but they had a few options available to them. One of those options was to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights and it looks like one of the founders is doing just that.

    TorrentFreak is reporting that Fredrik Neij is taking his case to the ECHR. A statement from his lawyer says that Neij’s right to “receive and impart information” is being infringed. Such rights are guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

    The relevant section of Article 10 as pertaining to this case:

    1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

    It appears that Neij and his lawyer are arguing that they only offered the service. It’s up to the users to decide whether or not to use The Pirate Bay for illegal activities. They also argue that they should not be held responsible for allowing the sharing of illegal content since the contents of the torrent files do not contain any illegal information.

    It’s a pretty good argument, and section 1 of Article 10 does provide protection “regardless of frontiers” which I would assume includes the Internet. It remains to be seen if the last sentence of section 1 will have any impact on this case. One could see The Pirate Bay as another option to gather information thus breaking up media monopolies which would be favorable to the court. I highly the doubt the court would hold such an opinion though.

    It’s important to note that they’re only going to the ECHR, because Sweden’s Supreme Court refused to hear the case. They feel that the court’s refusal only serves to make the law regarding torrents and copyright infringement murkier than it should be. A definitive decision, like with our own Supreme Court, helps to influence policy and laws in the future.

    Here’s hoping that the ECHR decides to hear the case. Without it, we might be stuck with a world where corporations, not governments, make the laws deciding what constitutes as piracy.

  • Alleged Copyright Infringers Could Be Outted By ISPs, EU Court Rules

    Earlier this month, a District Court in California ruled against a copyright holder who had wished to obtain the identity of a number of BitTorrent users by subpoenaing the ISP identified with the piracy. The copyright holder, Hard Drive Productions, wanted the IP addresses of the users who participated in the illegal file-sharing but didn’t wish to pursue the matter in court. Wisely, the District Court judge sense that Hard Drive essentially wanted the court to do the dirty work for them but not actually employ the court system to prosecute the accused copyright violators and therefore ruled that the ISPs didn’t have to reveal the identity of the alleged copyright violators.

    Across the Atlantic, a similar case in which copyright holders have demanded the identity of an alleged pirate be forfeited by a Swedish ISP wherein the European Court of Justice has decided that, yes, the ISP could be required to hand over the IP “which was allegedly used in an infringement.” This doesn’t mean that the ISP must now hand it over, per se, but rather that the case will return to Sweden’s Supreme Court in order to determine if the IP address will indeed have to be shared with the copyright holders.

    While this case is a suit to obtain the identity of one person who stored 2,000 audio books on his server whereas the California case was about ninety BitTorrent users, the same concerns cited by Judge Howard R. Lloyd in the BitTorrent case still persist, namely that the process of identifying the user via IP address is no guarantee of identifying the culpable person.

    Since the EU case is focused on only one user, it creates a dilemma between how courts should arbitrate when an ISP handing over IP addresses associated with illegal file-sharing. If it’s one, the thinking seems to be that the risk of misidentifying the copyright infringer is low; but if multiple identities are being requested, however, the risk of misidentifying copyright infringers goes up.

    Granted, these courts from country to country aren’t expected to rule in accordance.