Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 17:11:44 -0100 (GMT) From: anakata To: nopiracy@advfilms.com Subject: RE: Electronic Notice of Infringement - thepiratebay.org Hello, my dear sir(s)! We all like Evangelion a lot. This, however, does not mean that we like YOU. So instead of mindlessly acting on your notice of so-called infringement, I took the liberty of forwarding it to our legal counsel: On the subject of thepiratebay.org's supposed infringement of your intellectual rights. I have been given the authority, as legal consel, to reply to your kind letter. We understand that you are familiar with Bit Torrent technology. Then you may, or may not, understand that none of the data that you hold the copyright to reside on thepiratebay.org's servers. This raises the question of the reach of Swedish and European copyright law. It is the opinion of us, and the Swedish Supreme Court, that information about WHERE to obtain copyrighted material, which is the case with Bit Torrent, is not illegal. The '.torrent' files that are offered for download at the site in question contain nothing more than hash and checksum information. How this information could, in itself, possibly be an infrigement of your copyright is beyond us and apparently the Swedish legal system agrees. As to this date the third paragraph of the Swedish copyright legalislation does not criminalize information exchange. You may also wish to rewiev the 'Lag (1998:112) om ansvar för elektroniska anslagstavlor'. It is stated in the fifth paragraph that under certain circumstances an administrator of a site might be required to remove certain 'messages' entered by the users. However it is our opinion that '.torrent' files is not of the nature stated here. The subparagraph in question is aimed at stoping people from quoting whole literature works or posting copyrighted pictures. In your e-mail you state three demands. The first two are obviously completley void since The Pirate Bay in no way store any of your copyrighted data on their servers. As for the third demand: We have no intention of removing anything as long as our actions are not violating Swedish law and to our knowledge this is not the case. For your convience we took the time to review European law on this area. Considering that it takes several years, in some cases almost a decade, to get an answer from the European court on an inqury about how a law is to be interpreted, the question whether the european copyright law also includes bittorrent is less interesting. You may return in about 5 years when there is a ruling from the European Supreme Court. Until then we have no choice except respecting Swedish copyright law. And as we have explained the information contained in our servers is clearly not of the nature required of Swedish law, to be considered an infrigement of intellectual property. This would be similar to outlawing a map outlining where to find the library or the local video-rental store. Our guess, since you did not provide us with adequate information on which laws and regulations that you feel are violated, is that you are referring to 'Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society'. Whether or not this act does indeed state that the information contained in '.torrent' files is a violation of the authors' intellectual rights or not is of little importance in the case at hand. The act does not have direct effect and calls upon the member states to take appropriate action in order to protect the rights refered to in the directive. Obiously the Swedish government, to this date, considers that it has done so and that all rights are protected under the current Swedish legalizlation. And as stated above our activity on the site in question and on our servers are not in violation of Swedish law. As law-abiding good upstanding citizens we do not question our wise government's policy. Sincerely /Judas, on the behalf of The Pirate Bay