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Originally Posted by Shaggy
Can you find someone guilty of accessory to X without charging/prosecuting someone else of actually committing X? Can you be an accessory to a crime when the crime itself was not tried in court? I don't recall this trial including any of the actual copyright infringers being defendants?
Apparently you can, according to this judge. It sounds awfully weird though.
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It appears I'm not the only one to find this confusing...
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Professor Hydén continues with enumerating "at least three strange things in a strange trial": First, that someone can be sentenced for being accessory to a crime for which there is no main culprit: "This assumes someone else having committed the crime, and no such individual exists here... the system cannot charge the real culprits or it would collapse in its entirety." It is unprecedented in Swedish judicial history to sentence only an accessory. Second, that the accessories should pay the fine for a crime committed by the main culprits, "which causes the law to contradict itself." And third, that accessories cannot be sentenced to harsher than the main culprit, which means that every downloader must be sentenced to a year's confinement. Prof. Hydén sums up by saying that to allow this kind of judgement the Swedish Parliament must first pass a bill making this kind of services illegal, which it has not done.
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