I found this interesting (by user Jenny on the linked page):
No, he did NOT ask for protective custody (and I know as I'm in contact with his mother), this is how Sweden treats everyone being held pre-trial. There is a case right now where a guy who has been locked up like this for TWO YEARS is trying to get the supreme court to rule about his treatment. There is no time limit on how long anyone can be held like this, it can (and in many cases it has) go on for years. Amnesty and the European Council have criticized Sweden for this in the past.
..and this my friends is why Julian Assange wants nothing to do with being extradited there. Of course, there's also the fact that he'd be shipped to the US once they actually found him again.
It is no easier to extradite Assange from Sweden than it is from the UK, where he currently resides; both countries are parties to the ECHR. In fact, it's probably harder, as the consent of both the UK and Sweden would probably be required to extradite once he was removed to Sweden.
You are stating this as a fact but there is some proof to the contrary: Sweden has already extradited people to the US in cases where they really shouldn't have whereas the UK has so far been quite reluctant to do so, see the Gary McKinnon case recently.
The "double consent" requirement is irrelevant all the time Sweden has in recent history violated their own laws as well as international treaties to hand political asylum seekers to the CIA for shipment back to the very regime they were fleeing from.
Meanwhile, the UK actually relatively regularly refuse extradition requests.
If I worried about the US government, I know very well where I'd rather be, and Sweden would be _far_ down that list.
Sure there is. Sweden is a signatory to the ICCPR, like most of the world, and the ICCPR prohibits arbitrary or indefinite detention, requires due process, and forbids torture and cruel punishment.
Here's the most recent Periodic Report I could find for Sweden; these reports break down the ICCPR articles, provide some context for how the article is interpreted in the reporting country, and calls to light any issues the country has that complicate the interpretation:
To head off a very boring message board argument: having ratified the ICCPR (or, for that matter, having a strong constitution with guaranteed rights for the accused) doesn't automatically mean Sweden invariably respects those rights. But Sweden isn't a police state.
So this person is in jail for facilitating the ability of others to share restricted patterns of 1s and 0s. I hope this is as absurd to everyone as it is to me.
I don't agree that he should be in jail, but the "restricted patterns of 1s and 0s" bit is like saying that murdering someone with a gun is just facilitating the journey of a piece of refined earth that just happens to go through some watery carbon mass.
That analogy is stupid, When you "pirate" something all you are doing is sharing files, nobody looses anything tangible when this happens and nobody is harmed.
When you kill someone you take away their life. Can you see the difference?
The analogy highlights the rhetorical technique of abstracting something to such a degree that opposition seems unreasonable. It's like saying "I was arrested just for being myself!" when in fact you were arrested for flashing people on the bus. As an approach, this kind of extreme reframing is both abusive and dishonest.
When @ntumlin says "it's just a bunch of ones and zeroes" he completely disregards the intangible but very valuable order existing within them. Smash a glass to smithereens, but keep every one, and you still have "a bunch of atoms". Their arrangement, however, is very different - and far less valuable. Focusing only on the atoms to evade responsibility for the value lost in smashing the glass suggests you don't recognize the value of the unbroken glass, which is nonsense. Of course you recognize the value, which is why framing the situation to suggest otherwise is dishonest. And expecting others to go along with an obvious charade is abusive.
Beyond your dishonesty, @ntumlin, there's also real harm in your actions (assuming they reflect your thinking). The thing you have failed to acknowledge is that that, when you make a copy, you create an obligation to pay the holder of the copyright a specific amount of money. In other words, when you make a copy a portion of your money stopped being yours and became the author's. He now has a claim (albeit a small one) on your wealth. In the event of a failure to pay, the thing stolen is not the file itself, it's the money. THAT'S what you're stealing. Not the music, the money.
"Ok" you say "but I deleted the file". That's irrelevant. You're legal obligation isn't connected to having the file, it's connected to making it. Obviously, there are fair use laws that specify a range of situations in which making a copy doesn't trigger a corresponding obligation to pay. But if you're operating outside those parameters, then you're on the hook.
There's no scarcity of files. But there's a real scarcity of people with the time, talent, and resources to make really worthwhile content. And it's the arrangements - not the bits - is what constitutes our culture. At present, there's no reasonable way to enforce people's obligations to share the cost of what they otherwise "share" freely. That's where you find the deprivation - in the money that is no longer changing hands. And, if you think that a person who goes bankrupt because they can no longer charge for their work isn't harmed, you need a new definition of "harm".
One more thing: saying - as you do - that "it's just a bunch of ones and zeroes" to a person who may have sweated blood and tears for years to produce the arrangement that actually attracted your attention is just awful. It's an attitude that reflects something deeply rotten about you as a human being. Just understand this: culture thrives in spite of people like you, not because of them. In addition to the money you owe directly to artists, you own a debt of gratitude to those who did get them paid when you refused to do the same.
When you make an unauthorized copy a portion of your money stopped being yours and became the author's. He now has a claim (albeit a small one) on your wealth.
How much do I owe you?
That's where you find the deprivation - in the money that is no longer changing hands. And if you think that a person who goes bankrupt because they can no longer charge for their work isn't harmed, you need a new definition of "harm".
How does that not apply to second hand sales? Have I robbed RHCP when I sold my album on Ebay? After all, and unlike in P2P, the buyer was demonstrably willing to fork money for it, and so it's more likely that (s)he would have bought a new CD if I hadn't sold him/her mine.
There's obviously a difference between the indefinite ability to copy content and reselling a single used good.
I do think that filesharing should be legal, but the arguments you're making are losing ones. I think the real reason behind it relates to the purpose of copyright: http://zacharyalberico.com/day/2012/01/24
Apologies about linking to my own blog - but I wrote it up there so I don't have to rewrite it everywhere.
There's obviously a difference between the indefinite ability to copy content and reselling a single used good.
For physical things, sure, but for digital goods, that's not so clear. A P2P network that automatically lent (copy+delete local) files would require only a very small number of bought copies, if the client could request a copy, play it and then release it immediately.
The Doctrine of First Sale is like Fair Use in that it sets specific limits to the number and nature of situations in which publishers and authors can demand recompense for copying and / or redistributing their work.
So no, you haven't robbed anyone in the case of a second hand sale, since the law never recognized an obligation for buyers of second hand media to pay authors and publishers in the first place.
This underscores the extent to which the determination of theft depends not on the making of copies itself, but on the parallel (and completely artificial) institution that attaches legal obligations to the act of copying in certain, specific cases.
But the fact that I have a legal right to deprive someone doesn't mean I'm not. My first question stands: am I depriving and inflicting harm on RHCP by selling an used album?
To the extent that you've diluted the market for new copies in some small but real way, then yes, you have theoretically harmed the author.
However, the law doesn't recognize that harm as significant enough to be legally actionable. To the contrary, it recognizes that always placing the interests of authors above those of the public would do the public intolerable harm, and that the author is going to have to live with a less-than perfectly controlled market if he wants any control at all. What the author of a desirable work CAN expect is that there will be a reasonable volume of exchanges in which unavoidable obligations to pay do arise. Based on these he (or, more likely, his publisher) can invest in production accordingly.
If your copies and exchanges take place outside this range, then there's no way for the publisher to claim he's being unreasonably harmed by them, since the law gave him no reason to expect that he'd profit from these transactions in the first place. But if they take place within the parameters of demand that the law allowed him to bank against, then the illegal dilution of his legally recognized market constitutes very real harm.
Despite your condescending tone, I agree with the premise of your argument. But it's not like buying music from the distributors will help the artist, so the reasonable alternative is to get it from the source or not at all.
You're correct in thinking that a publisher who gives an artist a big advance and ends up making a decent return form the finished work may not share a dime of that with the artist. But given this success, the publisher is also a lot more likely to underwrite new work, which is very much to the benefit of the artist.
Meanwhile, the artist is in a position to increase their demands related to this follow-up effort, so saying that the publisher's success has no bearing on the artist's isn't correct. Yes, the artist has to negotiate well and produce more to realize that benefit, but the absence of a clear path isn't the same as the absence of any path.
That's not the experience of the majority of the artists, only a select few. For all practical purposes, if you aren't buying direct from the artist, you aren't supporting them.
Locking people up should only be reserved for people who are a physical threat to other people around them. Once you apply this kind of rule, you would basically remove a large number of currently jailed people.
That's not quite where I was going with this discussion.
We have a rather disgusting prison system, in which people are in a various forms of lockup for a multitude of crimes. Many of these prisons are for-profit corporations, which seek to lengthen prisoners' stay for added profit.
How do we go from what we have now to an ideal prison system? Because of our countries' governance model, even free peoples have problems getting any sort of assistance. Many of these people have been in jail/prison for years and have no clue how to survive.
We're not even covering the fact that in this country, a person imprisoned for a drug crime has all state and federal aid taken away from them. Thus ensuring that crime is almost the only route to live.
And what would you do with thieves, people who destroy property, hunters who kill animals illegally, and a million other non-violent categories that get jailed?
Community service. Fines. Putting them in prison only delays re-offending. Treatment outside prison is generally more likely to prevent them from committing further crimes.
I might not want to go quite as far as ekianjo, but prison is in general horrible for rehabilitation. I'm Norwegian. The Norwegian prison system has a far better rehabilitation rate than most, and this to a large extent has followed a gradual softening up of the prison system from one that was every bit as inhumane as the US system, but is now regularly described as "holiday camp".
Imprisonment is used far less, and the tendency is to reduce it further. For those who do end up in prison, sentences are generally far shorter, coupled with education and work (you can choose, but you need to do one or the other) in prison. Prisoners often get granted early limited parole (you can start getting weekends out of prison etc. long before a full parole, or monitored time outside the prison - e.g. a famous convicted murderer was recently interviewed at a cafe while she was out on parole, accompanied by a police officer...).
The result is a system that fits far better with the reality of the psychological effects one would presumably want a criminal justice system that cares about rehabilitation to have on a prisoner.
A large part of the problem with most prison systems is that they are based on emotions and demands for vengeance rather than an evidence based approach to actually minimizing harm to society.
Sweden has similar success with rehabilitation, though Sweden and Norway also unfortunately shares similar flaws to Sweden when it comes to pre-conviction detention.
It would be nice if people in the US cared about rehabilitation. Unfortunately, it just seems to be justice they (mostly) care about (and by justice, I mean vengeance and/or punishment).
And our political parties are so screwed up right now that trying to do anything about it would be a death sentence to a politician's career.
As I said before, I live in what we would call the "Bible Belt" within the USA: Indiana.
I've read about, as well watched a few documentaries about Norway's penal system. It's humane and treats people as punished- but still people trying to do better. I remember discussion of a prison 'island' in which prisoners set up a village there. You had a job to learn a trade, and/or get schooling where they were lacking. You had people of all sorts of crimes around, many a time with heavy machinery. Yet one thing was certain: if you treat people like animals, they shall act like it. This 'experiment' proved the opposite: treat them like civilized humans who at one time erred, and they will act like civilized humans.
But I live in Indiana. Even despite the restriction of making laws towards or against another religion, this state makes rules that are undoubtedly "Christian". This type of "Christian" however, is bloodthirsty, vindictive, bigoted, and hypocritical. Christians speak of forgiveness, yet are the first here to demand payback and retribution. We have scads of politicians who denounce decent sentencing, and instead attack other politicians for being "Soft on crime".
I honestly cannot see when our state (let alone the country) will regain sanity about prison and rehabilitation. It really is that bad.
Imprisonment is the privation of your liberty/freedom. This is the ultimate recourse of the Law and should not be used for any reason.
When you are in a punitive system, prison is applied as a way to punish people from their wrongdoings, no matter what. When you are in a "reparation" kind of system, there is almost no need for prison as long as the offender is made to pay back/repair for the property he destroyed (with interests). That can be done without the loss of someone's freedom to move and do what they like.
The exception I mentioned is for those who are of immediate danger to others if put back in the streets. Prison can, in these particular cases, be an efficient way to remove the threat by excluding these people from society, but I think we would agree that this would be a very small minority of the currently imprisoned population.
I have friends who have been in solitary confinement and they say it's nicer than jail (which is very nice in Sweden compared to other countries). It's not what you think it is or like how solitary confinement works in the US.
I don't get what's so wrong about solitary confinement. Being left in peace for 23 hours a day sounds perfectly fine to me especially if they give you stuff to read. I'd probably hate 1 hour when I'm not left alone than 23 remaining ones.
Is there some part of monkey brain that is supposed to kick in and cause me some distress on some lower level?
I've done a little solitary in military prison. No more than a week at a time though, on two occasions.
It's all about piling on anxiety and taking firm ground from under your feet. See before solitary you'd be in prison, you'd have your cell/tent mates around you; and though you're still being run around campus from 5:30AM to 11:30PM by the tired guards, you're suffering the drab food, the constant boot-camp, the fact you have nothing interesting to do at all or any personal time to do it at; but you're in it with the whole unfortunate/unruly bunch of your peers that you can relate to more or less. Not so in solitary.
In solitary you have no natural light, no company; they get to you when they get around to it (food or medical-wise), there's always some sicko screaming at the guards from behind his own cell door, kicking it. They don't turn off the lights ever, if they find you messing with your 'bed' that is not at a designated time, or just out of the blue sometimes – you'll get some personal time (a bootcamp and possibly a beating).
It isn't at all like they leave you alone. They do not.
The guards don't have any 'personal time' either, you see. They are on the job. And their job is to a) keep you alive and awake, b) make your life miserable, and c) keep you in line; in that order. They do shifts, and their job is to keep your head in prison. You stand no chance.
Maybe it gets worse after few weeks. The only effect I've noticed after not interacting with people for few weeks is that it's harder to speak for a short while after that.
No, he did NOT ask for protective custody (and I know as I'm in contact with his mother), this is how Sweden treats everyone being held pre-trial. There is a case right now where a guy who has been locked up like this for TWO YEARS is trying to get the supreme court to rule about his treatment. There is no time limit on how long anyone can be held like this, it can (and in many cases it has) go on for years. Amnesty and the European Council have criticized Sweden for this in the past.