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Pirate Bay Gets Marooned

Jared Rinaldi
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On January 31st, 2008, charges of copyright infringement were brought against four of the Swedish designers behind The Pirate Bay, the world's largest Bit-torrent tracker.

The media has thus far treated the case as a circus act. The Swedish press has covered the developments incessantly, and scalpers hawk tickets on the courthouse steps for what is already a full house.

On May 31st, 2006, Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay headquarters, seizing their servers and various other pieces of hardware. The incident was in no way isolated to Sweden, however. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had been working with various international governments for years, trying to destroy the Pirate Bay for what they perceived to be illegal file sharing.

In September of 2007, an anonymous hacker discovered that various companies affiliated with the MPAA, Universal, Parmount and Sony included, had been attempting to assemble their own team of hackers in order to disassemble and destroy The Pirate Bay.  The company struck back with a lawsuit, and further legal tension ensued.

The defendants claim that they are merely software developers, and that they should in no way be held responsible for what The Pirate Bay clients choose to download. We'll soon know whether that defense holds water or not: the verdict is expected to be reached on April 17th.

 

Image: "The Pirate Bay Logo", by Notinet. Courtesy of Creative Commons License. 

 

 

Comments

Hurry!

Submitted by psychonaut on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 12:28.
Quick download as much as you can fit on your drives before April 17th just in case things don't go our way.

Have no fear

Submitted by teledyn on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 13:38.

other than our hope that any (absurd) penalties brought against Pirate Bay should be commensurate with the perceived crime (perhaps "spreading rumours"?) you can have no fear that this will be the end of filetrading; where there is a need, there will always be a path, although you may find that you need to contact some mysterious person in a trenchcoat at a late night cafe to get the password for a "reasonable fee".

Prohibition and bootleggers is not, after all, a new phenomenon. Today here in Ontario maybe it's harder to find bathtub gin (or Caledon hooch), but there are beer/wine making shops in nearly every village, often nearly beside the government liquor stores.

Hmm...

Submitted by Brian Duffy on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 13:45.
While legally, thepiratebay certainly cannot be held responsible, I am really sick of all the posturing on the part of the people doing the downloading. They hail torrents as some savior of creativity, a golden land where a garage band can upload their demo tape and have it torrented by millions of new fans!!! Meanwhile, the top 100 on tpb is nothing but major motion pictures, new albums from major labels, and thousand dollar software. I'm not pretending that I don't torrent out the ass, but at least I admit that I just like getting shit for free.

Sharing

Submitted by SquirrelDog on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 15:42.

Why do we learn about sharing when we're really young if we can't practice it when we're older?

 

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unwinnable conflicts

Submitted by DeusExLibrus on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 22:00.
The government seems to love fighting wars they can't actually win. The war on drugs, terrorism, illegal file sharing ... because of the nature of these things, they cannot be stopped. Terrorism is a concept. Even if you take out one terrorist organization for example, there will be dozens more. I find the divide on file-sharing interesting. Some companies (Apple for example) have used the technology to make money. Others (the government) see it largely as a criminal enterprise. It seems to boil down to greed. The MPAA doesn't care at all about the actual media. All they care about is the fact that they are losing money. So in the end, neither side is being honest.

Exactly.

Submitted by Michael Henderson on Sat, 04/11/2009 - 20:36.

I must admit to rolling my eyes whenever I see mention of this ongoing and pointless struggle.

 

You cannot stop what the people want - Period. Point blank, and OBVIOUS!

 

File sharing is an entity of the Internet, which is by nature a system of MASS redundancy. Take one down, and several others will soon pop up to fill the need. 

 

These "Wars on Undisputable Facts" look more and more to me like long, drawn out temper tantrums. When will the child learn?