Amr Gharbeia's Library tagged Sweden →  View Popular

Håkan Roswall, acting on behalf of the content companies, argued successfully that the defendants were culpable, citing a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, that ruled that a defendant who held a friend’s coat while the friend duffed somebody up was also culpable in the attack.

But to my mind, the very companies suing Pirate Bay have also been complicit in much the same way. If you set aside the fact that they foisted digital technology on the public in the 1980s, they then went forward and developed a set of technologies — the re-writable digital versatile disc being just one example — that have helped spread piracy in much the same way as Pirate Bay. They not so much took hold the friend’s coat, but helped fashion the knuckleduster with which to beat the victim. And if you extend the logic that by creating a technology that can assist piracy you are also culpable of piracy, why stop at the Pirate Bay? Surely a whole network of agents collude to help filesharers engage in the act, including Google, Internet service providers, the inventors of BitTorrent and the telecommunications companies that distribute content to the Internet.