Last week, the would-be Pirate Bay buyer Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), was kicked out of the Swedish stock exchange Aktietorget for giving investors false information to exchange regulators.
Shares in the company had been halted for some time even before the ticker was kicked, as Aktietorget said the company “lacks the ability to inform its stockholders in a correct, relevant and credible way.”
Today however, GGF has made a comeback, this time on the Mangoldlistan Swedish stock exchange. The Mangoldlistan only lists seven companies however, and is run by a securities broker firm.
Questions still remain as to whether GGF has sufficient funds to acquire The Pirate Bay. In August, GGF bid 60 million Swedish kronor ($8.6 million USD) for the troubled public torrent tracker.
Result for: kronor
This morning, a 31 year old man from Sweden was found guilty in Sweden’s largest ever P2P case but escaped any jail time for his actions.
The man was initially accused of uploading 23,000 music tracks to the popular filesharing application Direct Connect but Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Agency’s (APB) “use of questionable investigative techniques forced the prosecutor to withdraw some of the charges”, down to about 4500 tracks. The man was also accused of uploading 30 movies.
Instead of jail time, the man received a suspended sentence and a “heavy fine.” The prosecutors were asking for jail time for the man, but the judge had this to say, “this is a task for the government, that by legislative means or in other ways take the necessary actions” to come to a solution to the problem.
More interestingly, the court even implied that the music industry needs to take some responsibility for the current situation they are in, where piracy is rampant, and many have little respect for copyright laws.
The fine however, is decently large and comes out to about 54670 kronor ($10,000 USD) including court fees he must pay back.
Minister of Justice, Beatrice Ask, commented on the trial:
“A consequence of the court having increased the sanctions in this case is that it will be easier to make ISPs give out information on IP addresses [in the future]. This of course affects the possibilities to act against these kinds of crimes.”
Morgan Gerdin, the defense lawyer, still feels her client was innocent. “The District Court hasn’t observed the technical evidence. It is not possible from that evidence to conclude that my client has been filesharing. He should have been found not guilty.”
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Result for: kronor
The MPAA has announced that is suing the infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay for $15.4 million USD citing “damages suffered” from 4 movies and 13 TV episodes uploaded to the tracker.
The movies in question are “Harry Potter 5″, “Syriana”, “The Pink Panther” and “Walk the Line” and all 13 episodes are from the hit show “Prison Break”. The MPAA is demanding $37 USD for each download of “Syriana”, “The Pink Panther” and “Walk the Line”, $43 USD for Harry Potter and $68 for Prison Break.
The Pink Panther was downloaded 49,593 times by Pirate Bay users, making it the most popular, while Syriana was the least popular with 3,679 downloads, according to MAQS, the law firm which is representing the MPAA in the case.
Brokep, a TPB admin, had this to say about the matter; “They know they are losing, and try to make us look like big criminals by adding some zeros to a claim for a made-up crime.”
“The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with,” Brokep added. “And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record.”
When an MPAA lawyer was asked whether she really believed every download was equivalent of a lost sale, she replied, “We don’t know that, but the copyright law doesn’t care about that. It says that if you have downloaded something illegally, you must pay regardless, if you would’ve bought it or not.”
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