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Sixteen Minutes

Monique Wasted enters the Guinness Book of Records. So does Paul McCartney.


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STOCKHOLM 17 April 2009 11:16 AM: Monique Wasted, Sweden's legal representative for the Hollywood MafiAA, declares the 107 page final ruling in the trial of The Pirate Bay to be well written and capable of standing up to inspection in the higher courts.

And thereby sets a new world record in speed reading.

Wasted made this statement sixteen minutes after the verdict was first announced, long before the copies of the verdict were even distributed.

Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay received a phone call the day before from a Swedish reporter telling him the verdict's been leaked.

Another world record as security around the Stockholm district court is notoriously tight.

Magical Mystery Tours Cost Hard Cold Cash

Paul McCartney is one of the two surviving members of the Beatles (if you don't count Yoko Ono) and he tells the BBC News service the verdict in the trial of the TPB is 'fair'.

'If you get on a bus you've got to pay. And I think it's fair. You should pay your ticket.'

Macca's been one really loved personality. He got major points when his wife Linda passed away. He got super bonus points because of Heather Mills. He's losing it all now.

We're talking about the Beatles here, the progenitors of the seminal Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and also one of the standout 'refuseniks' when it comes to iTunes and Spotify. The Beatles catalogue starts passing into the public domain in three years. That means Paul McCartney (and Yoko Ono) have but three more years to make more billions.

They're not exactly capitalising on the little capital they have left. And they're throwing away the goodwill they've accumulated as well [at least as far as Macca goes].

IFPI Down

A denial of service attack was carried out earlier against the IFPI site. For a while there no one got through. Could it possibly be animosity that caused this attack?

More Macca Pearls of Wisdom

Good job, Macca! Now you can go back to puffing your bud.

'Anyone who does something good, particularly if you get really lucky and do a great artistic thing and have a mega hit, I think you should get rewarded for that.'

'I'm in favour of that sort of thing.'

'The problem is you get a lot of young bands coming up and some of them aren't going to last forever so if they have a massive hit that's going to pay their mortgage forever.'

'They're going to feed the children on that and if they don't get that money, if they don't see that money, I think it's a bit of a pity.'

'I've been very lucky because my main era with the Beatles was at a time when everyone did get paid.'

'Particularly for young bands and they've got a young family, I don't want to see them destitute after a couple of years when they were mega. So I think it's fair.'

Smart guy, that Macca.

NordicBits

NordicBits shut down today. Here's what their website used to look like.



Here's what their website looks like today. They lasted one week and four years.

We have to shut down the site now due all circumstances. We don.t have time to do anything to the code, we don.t have interest to it, we don.t have any more money and the biggest reason is The Pirate Bay info.

We want to say thanks to everyone who made NordicBits possible, users, uploaders, seeder, moderators and administrators.

Hopefully the page will come back online late, but we new design, new information.

Thanks for us and keep the leeching up!

RIP Nordicbits (2005-04-10 - 2009-04-17)

Forum here
-Staff

Student Bay

The Swedish torrent site for student materials Student Bay is reportedly under investigation by egregious Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall. TPB's Gottfrid Svartholm Varg is the domain owner and thus also involved.

One Still Alive and Kicking!

Strangely - laughably, thankfully - there's one site still alive and kicking. You guessed it.

And on their home page today a dire warning.

What is going down in Europe?

What they're talking about (in their courageous English) is the 'three strikes' motion before the European parliament. As the proposal stands independent non-governmental organisations such as the IFPI will be able to interfere in ordinary Internet traffic, arbitrarily and preemptively decide individuals are participating in file sharing, and have them disconnected.

What amendment 138 is saying is that this is all a bit OTT and that such matters should be decided in a proper court where the accused have a chance to defend themselves.

But whilst Swedish authorities have gone public and proclaimed they are of course behind amendment 138 it's been found they've been working in secret in Brussels to stop amendment 138 from being added to the bill.

Rick Falkvinge of the Pirate Party has already called for their resignation.

On the Road Again

Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge is hitting the road hard. He's also helping administer the increasingly overloaded sites rickfalkvinge.se and piratpartiet.se from his seat on the Swedish country bus.

The Pirate Party is now Sweden's fourth largest political party and are increasingly seen as a 'shoo in' for at least one seat in the new European parliament.

Rick's current tour puts him in Jönköping today, Växjö tomorrow, Gothenburg the day after that, then Karlstand, Örebro, Lund, Kalmar, Linköping, and Eskilstuna all by 28 April. He'll be in Vancouver British Columbia in the second week of June.

And he's helping the others manage the two sites from a seat on a country bus. Any other politician in Sweden would still be hard put to save a document in Notepad or MS Word [and wondering why it can't also be done in Calculator].

It goes without saying what web server software Rick and the pirates are running.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.1 PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_python/3.3.1
    Python/2.5.2 mod_wsgi/2.3
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1
Last-Modified: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:07:25 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu) mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4 with Suhosin-Patch mod_python/3.3.1
    Python/2.5.2 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_wsgi/2.3 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6-2ubuntu4
X-Pingback: http://rickfalkvinge.se/xmlrpc.php
Last-Modified: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:59:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close

The Conservative Middle Aged Gentleman

Best of all is a mailing list post found by a journalist at a Swedish tabloid. It's reproduced here in its entirety and it sums up what most people are thinking today.

Myself I'm a conservative middle aged gentleman who has never ever shared a file. (And I really hate pirate copying.) Nevertheless it's my intention to join the Pirate Party, vote for them in the European elections, and donate money to their campaign.

The reason for this is of course the fact that all the other political parties are clearly prepared to introduce deranged disproportionally repressive laws and controls so that a rather unessential industry (entertainment) for a few more years will be able to cling to a completely obsolete and antiquated business model.

It would be one thing if this was about war and terrorism, about an acute shortage of food or pure water. One might then understand that the situation was so terribly serious that a few limitations on our personal integrity were necessary.

But this is about something that's not in the least necessary for our survival or health but about people in a rather irrelevant industry being able to hold onto an antiquated way to make way too much money, about today's troubadours, actors, and other jesters and their financiers not needing to adapt their business model to the technological development.

A total, a completely unbelievable, a completely pathological lack of sense of proportion. About the same as razing an entire village to the ground only because the emperor for a few weeks wants to take his quiet morning walks in the area.

And finally a question: is there anyone on this mailing list (save for MPs and others caught in a conflict of interest) that's _not_ planning on voting for the Pirate Party in the European elections? And if so: WHY THE HELL NOT?

Considering these are elected politicians who are seriously considering the above and even worse options over the heads of those who voted for them one wonders why there haven't been guillotines pulled out into town squares a long time ago.

How many names can Madame Defarge knit in sixteen minutes?

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