The worst part of this is the assorted fines imposed on the founders of TPB. The prison sentences probably won't amount to much...I don't expect brokep to serve time (I have been following his situation for years now), which is good news.
Exactly. The best way to obliterate a young adult from the society forever is to slash him with fines that he just can't and won't pay. There are several cases like this in Finland, namely few kids who ran a p2p sharing hub (without sharing any of the files, just running the server, AFAIK).
This means the young adult won't ever go to work because nearly everything he would ever make would be deducted to pay off the fines he can never finish up. Thus he will simply not pay the fine, become unemployed, and make the country pay him social security to live. Any work he will actually do will be gray, i.e. unofficial untaxed "pirate" income that doesn't formally exist. Way to go.
The TPB guys probably have more ambitious plans as the liberation front of bit-sharing. I bet this might just tip an even larger percentage of Swedish people to support TPB and the Pirate Party. Isn't the only thing that is, in the crowds of conservative government or business, more dangerous than a liberty fighter an imprisoned liberty fighter?
"Isn't the only thing that is, in the crowds of conservative government or business, more dangerous than a liberty fighter an imprisoned liberty fighter?"
Oh please. A bunch of guys who want to download music and videos for free aren't 'liberty fighters'. You can disagree with copyright, or current implementations of copyright, or whatever, but calling activists of marginal issues like this 'liberty fighters' is devaluating the concept of a true 'liberty fighter', much like 'terrorism' has been devaluated to mean pretty much everything that pisses somebody else off.
Perhaps he means liberty in the sense of freedom from being America's lapdog. One might be considered a "liberty fighter" for wanting to be held accountable by their own country's morals and mores, and not at the insistence of another country. The method "free music and videos", might be irrelevant to that perspective.
They can probably file for bankruptcy. The fame they accumulated means they won't have problems borrowing for their future businesses, so a bankruptcy would be a nice way out (obviously after securing their existing assets). IANASwedishL though.
I don't think it's possible to file for personal bankruptcy in Sweden, or at least I think that doing this doesn't cause the debt to disappear. (Norwegian here). Are there any Swedes who can clarify this?
I'm not a Swede, but it looks like you're right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy#Sweden It might be better to enter into a debt arrangement called "skuldsanering" - now that sounds curious :)
Skuldsanering is the Swedish option for personal bankruptcy, but differs in a number of significant ways. First of all you send in an application, disclosing all your debts and assets, and I believe there's an interview process as well. If they think you're hiding something, should reasonably be able to dig yourself out your hole on your own or don't think you've tried hard enough to sort your problems out on your own then you'll get denied. If accepted you have to sell of all your assets and spend the next several years making a good faith effort to earn as much money as you can and pay back as much of the debt as you can. I believe that if they think you're not being serious or not trying they can cancel the deal at any time. Only once all that is done will any remaining debts be cancelled.
