The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) represents the interests of the recording industry as a whole worldwide and recently took the founders of The Pirate Bay to court. Unfortunately for the founders, they ended up being charged $3.5 million in fines even though they said they would not cough up a single cent. To get back at the IFPI, they have devised a scheme called the Distributed Denial of Dollars (DDo$) attack.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a founder of the The Pirate Bay (known by his alias anakata) came up with the idea. The idea encourages people to use the Internet to pay a tiny Internet gift of $0.13 and send it to the Danowsky law firm. This law firm represented the IFPI in the court case. The law firm only allows 1,000 money transfers and if enough people send them a donation, it will cost the law firm more to handle and process those payments.
Clever move, Svartholm. If the plan goes through and Danowsky decides to sue Svartholm for the attack, it would suck if he had to face the same judge again.
“Is the Colonel’s underwear a matter of national security?” That is my favorite line from the movie, A Few Good Men. Tom Cruise’s wittiness in that movie reminds me of the wittiness used by the lawyer for The Pirate Bay during this potentially long and arduous trial. The third day of the trial ended early just like yesterday’s day of the trial. Yesterday 50% of the charges were dropped because of the prosecution’s lack of the ability to properly explain what BitTorrent was.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) used an argument that damages caused by The Pirate Bay offering The Beatles’ song “Let It Be” through a torrent should be 10 times the damage since the music is available anywhere else online. The Pirate Bay doesn’t have the funds and cannot pay the damages for offering that song even though Peter Danowsky stated that The Pirate Bay is “organized crime on a grand scale” and netted “significant revenus” from various sources of advertising.
“If I have all this money they claim, someone has apparently stolen it from me,” stated The Pirate Bay’s co-founder Peter Sunde on Twitter. Peter Danowsky said that even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t have all that money, they can pay a lot of it anyway.
“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” stated Carl Lundström’s lawyer Per E Samuelsson. “According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia.” Lundström’s company provides technical services to The Pirate Bay. After this statement the court adjourned.
Sunde later reported on Twitter that after the court was adjourned, “We had some pizza after todays episode of #spectrial. Met the whole oposing side and asked if they could pick up the check. They refused .”
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