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In one of the least-surprising legal moves in recent memory, Swedish authorities have laid charges against The Pirate Bay, one of the largest trackers of BitTorrent downloads in the world (it recently passed the 10 million peers mark), on behalf of several movie studios and record labels, including Warner Bros., Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.
This isn't surprising for a number of reasons. For one thing, the Swedish authorities have said several times over the past few months that they were going to file charges; and for another thing, the site's name is The Pirate Bay -- I mean, come on :-)
At first glance, it seems obvious why Swedish prosecutors are suing the company. After all, by going through The Pirate Bay, people can get access to millions of movies, songs, software programs and other digital files, and download them freely without paying for them. The sticky part, however, is that The Pirate Bay doesn't host any of those files -- like Google, the site is nothing but an index of where those files are located. The actual files are hosted on millions of computers around the world, some of which may only have a small part of the original file, thanks to the magic of the peer-to-peer technology known as BitTorrent.
In other words, The Pirate Bay is only pointing Internet users to those files, in the same way that Google and Yahoo and MSN point users to webpages. Is that -- or should that be -- a crime? In a similar vein, a music search engine called Seeqpod is being sued by the record label EMI because it makes it easy for people to find public mp3 files on the Web (there are half a dozen other services that do the same thing, including Songza and g2p.org). Should that be illegal? G2P.org actually just does a search through Google to find files. If that's illegal, does that make Google responsible for linking to those files?
Even if The Pirate Bay is successfully sued, it isn't likely to affect downloading much. The site may have the largest torrent "tracker" in the world, but it isn't the only one -- there are thousands of them. Even if The Pirate Bay is found guilty and goes out of business, the servers that run the site aren't actually located in Sweden and will likely continue functioning (The Pirate Bay claims to not even know where the servers are). The founders of the service say their tracker will remain operating even if they are found guilty.
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Oh Canada from Canada writes: The reality is that these industries cried foul with Tapes, VCR's and so forth.
Culture, art and technology will proliferate as humans by nature have copy.
Word, text and now data files.
These industries should realize and the MPAA openly admits they can never end piracy.
Furthermore, this is a great moment for Western culture. Big name business will have less of a stake in who makes it big. Live talent, not expensive studio produced talent should be their focus.
In addition, sharing files gives access to the poor, to students and other groups that could not afford expensive programs, etc when they are now available to them for free.
Everyone should torrent five files themselves to share and view these movies:
Steal this Film
Steal this Film II
These mega-businesses are the true pirates, charging obscene amounts and polluting our culture with Britney Spears.- Posted 01/02/08 at 4:08 AM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
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John Williams from Ajax, Canada writes: The Pirate Bay guys are very interesting, especially since they don't even know where the servers are.
Once that site gets blocked, someone else somewhere will set up a replacement, with no names attached, and it will continue unabated.
Its wack-a-mole x a million.
And the more the Industry attacks, the angrier the Moles get, and the moles will stay up 24/7 to figure out ways to smite them.
The guy from U2 is screaming now too. If they are all being robbed, why are they all so rich?
By the way, you can find all the same Torrents using Google direct anyway.- Posted 01/02/08 at 7:49 AM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
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A. Nonymous from Contentville, United States writes: I think we should simply trust the wisdom of the content corporations who are clearly in the right here.
They go to extreme lengths to produce fine audio/movies and just want to be compensated a fair price.
I think we should simply pay whatever they ask, and consume what ever they produce.
CONSUME! CONSUME! CONSUME!
Don't ask questions it will just hurt your brain, big brother knows best.
CONSUME!- Posted 02/02/08 at 8:47 PM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
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