File-sharing site The Pirate Bay should be closed, and if it isn't, two of the founders will each have to pay a fine of 500,000 Swedish kronor (US$71,500), according to a verdict in the Stockholm District Court on Wednesday.
Back in May, the entertainment industry -- represented by companies such as Sony, Universal, Disney and Paramount -- filed a motion with the court to fine the people behind the Pirate Bay operation as long as the site's users can access copyright-protected material.
Previously, ISP (Internet service provider) Black Internet was fined for providing data access to the site. That verdict resulted in the site going down for a brief period, and has since been appealed.
But this time it's Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg who are in the court's crosshairs. They have been forced to shut down the site or pay the fine.
The court has stated that the site will have to remain closed unless Neij and Warg are exonerated on another similar case they're involved in, which is now on appeal.
In that case both men were found guilty of being accessories to crimes against copyright law. The appeal was recently postponed, and won't be heard until next year.
Neij defends himself by saying that the original case is still not decided and that he isn't involved with the running of the site.
Warg has stayed quiet throughout this process, according to court documents.
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FRENCH (insurer) PIRATES protected by BANK SECRECY
GROUPAMA was caught in a software PIRACY case of $200 million and has made an unofficial affidavit (claiming that it was not guilty) to divert Police investigators from the evidences officially collected one month ago at a different office.
In its affidavit, GROUPAMA argued that bank secrecy entitled it to limit the scope of Police investigations to a building that was not the place where evidences about the infraction were officially collected.
After the fraud was discovered and denounced by the victim, as GROUPAMA managed to have the General Prosecutor of Paris to state that Police was 'right' to ignore the criminal file and focus only on the irrelevant information provided by GROUPAMA itself, there is room for serious doubts in the way that affair was conducted.
As a matter of facts, FINAMA and GROUPAMA have reported false information to the markets regarding their own accounts (where the fraud describbed below has never been reported).
This unfortunate event is more than likely to compromize the confidence ratings of French (bank and insurance) regulated markets on the proven basis that the numbers cannot be trusted.
All the details, including the General Prosecutor reply, the BEFTI investigation file and the unofficial affidavit cooked by GROUPAMA have been made publicly available:
http://remoteanything.com/archives/groupama.pdf
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