Buccaneers
If there was ever a reason to worry about the bullying tactics of the current government of the USA it was the recent story that broke about ‘The Pirate Bay’.
The Pirate Bay is a site (the servers being based in Sweden) which hosted torrents for a range of materials including Movies, Music, Games, TV and Books (to name but few categories) It is one of the world’s most popular websites for file-sharing.
On May 31st Swedish Police entered the premises of Pirate Bay and seized a number of file servers. The servers not only hosted the torrent information but also the files and pages for a number of perfectly legitimate sites. It behoves me to say that Pirate Bay is operating legally under Swedish Law. The sites were back up and running within a couple of days from the Netherlands and are now back up and running in Sweden.
The RIAA in America obviously have a big problem with this information being hosted and materials being made available with royalties being paid to artists. They have a sent lots of legal request for cease and desist and warning letters which Pirate Bay promptly ignored because they were operating perfectly legally.
Now it turns out the White House was behind the raids. Swedish Television says it has documents that show the U.S. threatened to go to the World Trade Organization to impose economic sanctions against Sweden if the site was not stopped. The message reportedly came through the American Embassy in Stockholm.
According to the documents, a chief prosecutor was called to the Justice Ministry and ordered to take action. Dan Eliasson, state secretary to the Minister of Justice, has admitted that the American government suggested there was a risk of sanctions against countries that don’t respect international copyright protections. He also says the ministry provided information on the issue to the chief prosecutor including what are described as “instructions and priorities”. But, Eliasson says, no improper pressure was put on the public prosecutors.
What on earth are the American Government doing trying to bully another government into taking actions against it’s OWN citizens when they are obeying that country’s OWN laws? Does anyone think for ONE SECOND that America would do that if it were asked told to do that by another government?
My Thanks to Radio Sweden
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