Friday 18 April 2008

IFPI's Swedish nightmare

The following piece is from the The Local, Sweden's news in english - as my Swedish's a bit rusty.

'Judicial scandal' in Pirate Bay case

A Swedish police officer involved in the investigation of file sharing site The Pirate Bay has been given a job with one of the plaintiffs in the case, film company Warner Brothers.

The officer began working for Warner Brothers job several months after the preliminary investigation was completed. The same police officer is scheduled to appear as a witness in the forthcoming Pirate Bay trial, newspaper Sydsvenskan reports.
Defence lawyer Peter Althin said he would be looking into the matter.
"The question is how long this was under consideration. If it was under consideration at the time of the investigation then it is a scandal," he told Sydsvenskan.
Althin is representing Peter Sunde, one of four men charged charged with being an accessory to breaking copyright law.
"This is a judicial scandal. Talk about a conflict of interests," Sunde told the newspaper.
If the police officer is found to have entered into discussions with Warner Brothers before the end of the investigation, which took a year and a half to complete, it is possible that the prosecution will have to scrap its findings and start again, said Althin.

Perhaps the IFPI should have stuck to taking consumers (the end users of its conglomerate parts products) to court instead.

When does 512MB equate to 2GB?

When you are a T-Mobile customer upgrading your yearly contract and someone in customer services either can't be bothered to find out, or they think it's a very good late April Fool's wheeze, or it's company policy to get rid of old 512mb cards by telling those who they think are technically non-enabled that "the 512mb card is in fact 2GB, but just labelled incorrectly."

So having a customer (was eavesdropping over flatmate's conversation) call up and be laughingly told that the supplied card has just been labelled wrong and it is in fact 2GB and not the 512MB emblazoned across its front, makes me wonder how many other people have they tried this particular con on.

But today as flatmate spoke with another customer services representative, they apologised and said the correct card would be arriving tomorrow.

It's a shame that a painless upgrade process should be marred by the incorrect card been included in the first place, then by the attitude of the representative of such a big brand.

So T-Mobile, 2 raspberries!