I would suggest that is a level above what we are looking at. The WTO is really for governments rather than individuals and trade pressure groups. For example, the US government filed a complaint with the WTO against the government of China over their general lack of enforcement of copyrights and patents held by US organisations.Quote:
but I doubt that the swede govt would have even bothered with this without pressure from the WTO
The European Union is made up of a number of sovereign states, unlike the USA. There will be no "Northern War of Economic Aggression" over here [:lildevil:], if a member wants to pull out, they can. Given this sovereignty, they have different local laws.
All EU states raise a large amount of revenue through Value Added Tax, which is a form of sales tax, and would be reduced by the free distribution of copyrighted materials. It is therefore in their interest to prevent file sharing if it represents a significant loss of tax revenue. The fact that no member state seems too interested in pursuing filesharers suggests to me that they don't think that the entertainment industry's claims regarding lost revenue are in any way realistic.
Not only is there the sales tax angle, there is also the corporate and personal taxation on those involved in the supply chain.
What has happened here is interesting, in that it was a criminal action regarding encouraging others to break the Swedish copyright law. As there does seem to be a case to answer, I don't think that the Swedish authorities had much choice once a complaint was filed?
I suspect that the reason this has taken so long to happen is that they were giving TPB enough rope to hang themselves.
Obviously, TPB neither hosts nor distributes illegal (copyrighted) material so that is a legal non-starter.
That leaves the general search engine defence. Sure, you can find illegal downloads but the difference is that the search engines only enable you to do so rather than encourage.
I guess that is what this case actually rests on? Does TPB encourage people to illegally download or merely enable?
