I’ve been holding some talks here, about freedom. People in brazil are very cool, they’re really into free software and have the same values as pirates in Europe. And there’s a big difference between Brazil and Sweden for me.
In Sweden, I can’t even get a meeting with our justice department. In Brazil, I had a chat last night with President Lula. He’s been one of the driving forces in getting rid of proprietary software in the govt and replacing it with a program for mostly using freee software. Brazil has had some bill proposals in place for ruining the Internet but yesterday the president essentially promised to make sure these bill do not pass.
I wish that Europe could be more like this when it comes to fighting for freedom. But I think that in our part of the world, people might have forgot how important it is since the fights we’ve had in the past has been starting to fade out or our memories.
Over here I’m all over the news papers. There’s pictures of me and the president in the news and I got to sign autographs even when I left the conference and went to a night club in Porto Alegre, at 3am. It’s weird! But it makes me sure that the fight we’re doing is important and that people care.
Maybe I will get to visit the justice department in Sweden when it’s been replaced…
When people think you’re down and out, that you’ve lost and have no way to win… that’s the perfect time to hit them harder than ever before. Ammunition is loaded and the cannons are aimed. We’re all The Pirate Bay.
Need one say more? Thomas Bodströms friend is now also on board to decide if there’s been a bias situation or not in our case.
Of course, I might becoming a bit paranoid. But it’s still never our lawyers or friends that are mentioned in these situations, only the other parties friends and co-workers.
The document I refer to was deleted from regeringen.se - if I remember correctly because there was copyrighted material in the document illegally.
News today says that Anders Eka is the person (together with some friends) who will decide if the judge in #spectrial S01 was biased or not.
The court decided that he will try the case because he is not involved in any interest groups for intellectual property and none of his helpers are the same.
But does that really help? One of my best friends, Google, gave me this link:
A document about The Stockholm Center for Commercial law.
And when you scroll through that document, you all of a sudden find a nice interesting part called “People conected to the center”. Scroll to the list of people in the “Research center for media rights”. People on that board?
Monique Wasted, Peter Danowsky, Jan Rosén (assistant to Monique in the TPB-case and also the chairman for the swedish organisation for copyright), Daniel Westman (another one involved in the same sphere of Jan Rosén and Monique Wasted) - and of course, Anders Eka.
Note: Not any of OUR lawyers are on that board. But two of the opponents lawyers in the same board. Together with two of their main helpers.
… and I have only just started to google for the people.. it took me longer time to write this blog post than to find the information. How come noone else does this?
One would imagine that, as part of an ongoing court case, you would get all information about that case from a lawyer. Not so much in our #spectrial - we get most of the news in the media, even before our own lawyers.
Today I just read an article in Svenska Dagbladet - there’s been a decision about which judge is going to take care of our case in the next court instance.
However it seems that this person - Ulrika Ihrfeldt - has been a member of the Swedish association for copyright. So there’s of course been an outrage in sweden that letting her decide if the previous judge Tomas Norström was biased or not is really wrong! Interesting thing here - the court listened to it and decided that it would be better to let another division decide that.
Am I the only one that understands that if the court decides that they are not fit to decide themselves because there might be a situation of biasness - they essentially confirm that it was a biased situation in the first #spectrial?
Oh and on a note regarding the fact that Peter Danowsky (that reads my blog like it’s his favorite jelly beans, the one with blood-taste) quotes me and my blog quite often in paperwork he sends to the courts - I just want that I’m happy you have a source to copy. Isn’t copying nice?
One of the lawyers on our side, Per E Samuelsson, have apparantly got some information that Tomas Norström has been more active within the copyright groups that he’s a member of, during the period that he knew that he had the trial assigned to him.
Also, it appears that the normal way to randomly select a judge in a court case has been set aside. I.e., it looks like Norström has been chosen specifically, not randomly! This is a really serious thing!
When I have some more news I will publish it. Interesting…
Due to the past weeks findings on the biased judge we’ve all demanded a fair trial. That means doing a re-trial. Or a re-#spectrial, that is! But that’s not all.
We’re thinking of demanding a new police investigation. There’s been too much questions marks regarding both the trial and the police investigation. The police officer, Jim Keyzer, knew that he had a well paid job at not just one but two of the companies that had filed charges against us, after a well done police investigation. Lots of stuff that where to our advantage was not included in the investigations outcome.
The first time I met Jim Keyzer and got questioned by him, he actually already knew about his new job.
So this week we will demand a completely new police investigation.
Too many people have ties to our opponents and has been proven to be on the pay-roll or promised to become employed in the future. We want everything to be in the eye of the public so that we can get help to see that everything is correct. We need to trust the system but the system needs to be transparent enough so we can trust it.
A lot of media attention the past days. We decided to just say no to all media because it’s not fair to just talk to the big ones (or even just talk to the small ones). We decided to just have a press conference tomorrow at 13.00 CET, on bambuser. That way, everybody can participate, no matter how big they are, or if they’re even media or not. It’s more important for us to talk to those who are interested in the case itself than just the media who wants to be first and exclusive in order to sell more…
Most media handle this excellent - I’ve talked to the big ones such as CNN and BBC a lot, smaller swedish media like SvD and DN etc. Almost all of them understand our point of view and the reasons why we selected to only have one press conference instead of having to chose media channels. The bambuser-feed will be as highres as possible so it could be used for TV, that’s the main goal. Just being at one place makes it more fair.
But there are some media that can’t handle this. Swedish TV4 has almost always been very unfair in the reporting surrounding TPB. They’ve straight out lied and they’ve been reported to Granskningsnämnden (kind of the swedish FCC) not only by us but by many people for their unfair reporting. We decided over a year ago to ban them from talking to us along with Metro, Aftonbladet and another “newspaper”. TV4 texted me this morning asking for an interview tomorrow after the verdict.
I declined (since I’ve decided to not do any interviews but only participate in the press conference, in the name of fairness) - and I also pointed out that if I would give an interview it would not be to TV4 because of their previously crappy reporting. I got a text message back saying “Ok, we’ll never contact you again.” and I replied that I’ve tried telling them many times before to actually not contact us at all, so we’re happy about that decision.
… Some minutes ago they contacted me again (again using SMS, which is awesome since I hate getting phone calls and I can’t reply to all e-mails) and asked for us to join on saturday to discuss the verdict… So much for never being contacted again.
To point out - I don’t dislike that many of the journalists. I mostly dislike the editors that can’t even say that they’ve done wrong when it’s so clear that it happened. They even admitted being wrong but where to proud to say “sorry”. And can we trust a media company like that? Of course not.
Tomorrows press conference will probably be TPBish. Stay tuned…
Some days ago I got to view a small preview of a trailer for “TPB - AFK” (a documentary about The Pirate Bay by Simon Klose. Only a few select people was invited to the screening and it was quite interesting that someone actually made a CAM OF THE TRAILER AND PUT UP ON THE NET!
I think Simon would probably be a bit sad about it since he’s sitting on the material until 5-7 years before he releases the final documentary (when all the crimes recorded are too old to prosecute for I guess? :-))
But we have to stay true to our pirate selves and while trying to figure out whom of the maybe 20 people in the screening room actually filmed it, I’m hoping Simon is taking it good! The clip is embedded below. The quality sucks though, Simon should have invited a better cammer!
