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The pirate bay verdict is in and the proprietors have been found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. Ouch.

Not really ouch , could have, should have, been a lot harsher.

i doubt that will slow them down to terribly, others will pick up the slack i'm sure

They were also fined the equivalent of $4,000,000.

And seeing as their have now been convictions, people might be less willing to pick up said slack.

I'm in 2 minds about this.

Copyright and IP laws exist with good reason and just because a business is 'big' doesn't make it any more morally acceptable to steal from them.

The Pirate Bay existed for one reason only, to facilitate the violation of copyright laws, so comparisons to Google miss the mark quite spectacularly. This may not harm the big artists but you can bet your ass that many small artists and labels have given up the ghost over piracy. We just never hear about them.

Its a false argument that because nothing physical is being taken its not theft. Plenty of money and potential sales are being denied to companies and artists because of piracy.

Yet I am a hypocrite. A massive hypocrite. I admit this.

I personally have not paid for an album in about 3 years. Yet I download plenty. Can I defend this on any kind of moral level? Nope. I do it only because I've got other things I'd rather spend that £10 on. Toys, Clothes, Bills, Booze, Rent, the list goes on.

I'm at least prepared to admit I'm in the wrong in the eyes of the law and common decency.

As far as the pirate bay guys go it really is a fair cop guv. The sentence seems a bit harsh but I'm not familiar with Swedish law so can't really comment further.

Fair cop is the right word. It's like a Fence claiming to simply be a search engine for sellers and purveyors of stolen goods.

Sure, they didn't pinch it, or buy the goods knowing they are stolen, but if it were not for them, some criminals would find it harder to flog their goods on.

Plus the site was clearly setup to aid in the distribution of films and music illegally.

Here's an interesting discovery. I was just perusing the BBC's website and was looking through the 'Have your Say' section on this particular story and came across this comment.

I'm an author, and so earn royalties on my hard work. Why do some people seem to think that I should work for free while they get paid for their work? Anyone who distributes my work for free is stealing from me. If you want something you have to pay for it; wanting something for nothing is parasitic.
I suppose the pro-sharing lobby also think it is okay to take the bus without paying the fare, or skip out on paying for their meals in restaurants. To me, it amounts to the same thing.

Gva Thorpe, Nottingham

Nice to know where the BL stand on this.

At the third stroke, the time will be time for the Anti-GW Lobby to turn up and berate Gav for his sheer greed.

Beep....Beep....

Price increase!

The Pirate Bay verdict seems shady to me. The prosecution made a number of changes during the process. However, Scandinavian law is different to British, so maybe that doesn't count.

While I disagree with downloading, this verdict won't stop people from doing it.

for each site they shut down, a half dozen seem to pop up to replace it

I kinda missed the whole thing. Isn't pirate bay just another torrent site?

They were essentially charged as facilitators (being a search engine that contained links to files that allows people to break copyright), making it possible and easy for people to break copyright. Now, with that in mind, go to the Googles and type [insert movie here] torrent, and you'll get innumerable hits. So, campers, how is the Pirate Bay breaking the law and Google isn't?

Don't really care one way or the other, because as long as people can convert anything into a digital media, and upload it to the internet, there's gonna be piracy no matter what anyone thinks or does.

Difference between Google and Pirate Bay though, is that Torrent searches are Pirate Bays sole purpose, whereas Google is not.

I can see the powers that be erm, encouraging, Google to block certain search parameters. Whether this is possible or not I dunno!

There's a precedent for that - is it china or korea where you can't search "democracy" on google?

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Difference between Google and Pirate Bay though, is that Torrent searches are Pirate Bays sole purpose, whereas Google is not.

Pirate bay are not just a search engine, they also operate a massive bittorrent tracker. While it could sort of be argued that this is still somewhat similar to google, the tracker is the bit of technology that is required for the torrent transfers to actually work*, whereas google merely links to the torrents, piratebay hosts the torrents and the tracker behind them that enables many of them to function. It is somewhat similar but it is not an apples to apples comparison.

* excluding DHT / magnet which is a more recent development

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:I can see the powers that be erm, encouraging, Google to block certain search parameters. Whether this is possible or not I dunno!

I'd certainly like to think that if they did this the people would rise up as one and kill every member of the 'powers that be', but I'm not really that hopeful.

You know, they made a massive mistake by calling intellectual property theft "Piracy", because everyone wants to be a pirate deep down inside. They shoud've called it "Skulduggery" or something ominous-sounding.

My opinion: FTP!

You can't stop it forever. If they still can't stop drug dealers from peddling goods after their huge "War Against Drugs" campaigns then they'll never stop people popping stuff on the net for everyone to share.

The Pirate Bay existed for one reason only, to facilitate the violation of copyright laws, so comparisons to Google miss the mark quite spectacularly. This may not harm the big artists but you can bet your ass that many small artists and labels have given up the ghost over piracy. We just never hear about them.

The reverse is actually true. The big artists are the ones with popularity enough to see a bottom line impact from piracy. Artists don't begin making profit from album sales until they begin to take off, small gigs pay the bills until then. Unfortunately popular artists are also the ones that are overpayed anyway in a broken capitalist system thats willing to give people like emenem millions of dollars for singing about raping his mom.

I have no sympathy.


The biggest mistake these guys made was to call the site the pirates bay. That clearly labeled their intent.

I say its good that the propertiors got sent in to jail for one year.
I dont know why but i don't like pirate bay.

I always love hearing the music / media guys spout how much it's costing them when there is no real proof of that. Of course illegal downloading is going to have an impact on profits, but people's shopping habits were changing already. In the old days a record company would release 2 - 4 singles off an album, then the album itself, so fans ending buy all of them and the record company makes a nice big profit. Nowadays people can buy what they want, not a whole album, so therefore are more picky, meaning they are spending less.

The music industry has always been arrogant, they forget that both sides need each other to get what they want. The public wants music, they supply it. If the public decides to cut back or loses interest, it has no impact on them... but it will affect the music industry. At the end of the day, joe public can survive without the music industry, but the music industry can't survive without joe public.

The music industry will never get full public support unless the public begins to stop feeling that they are being ripped off. Let me see... you have to pay a licence fee to play music in a public place, the radios have to pay a fee everytime a song is played, same with music channels, they want the copyright laws changed so they own the copyright for longer and they waste millions on their top stars satisfying their everywhim. Again, forgeting we can survive without them, not the other way round.

All this applies to the film industry as well, they spend silly amounts of money on stars and their whims, making films that bomb and then having the nerve to charge us a high price for a DVD. Something which basically the only costs are in the design of the interface, the dvd and the artwork, which when applied to the amount of dvd's produced will work out as peanuts. In fact the interface design & artwork design are probably done inhouse, so that drops the cost down as well.

Me personally, I don't do "cam" jobs when it comes to movies, so don't download them. The people who do will probably either go and see the film at the cinema as well, they just wanted to see it first, or wouldn't of gone in the 1st place so they aren't missing out on a paying customer.

None really have any idea of what's really going on, they are just told it's costing them money, so they start screaming blue murder. The twisted logic is that although murder is evil society will carry on, but anything to do with the economy will always grab a government's attention. Just think about it, a person gets badly beaten up and nearly dies, the attacker is caught. It's the attackers first offence, so they may end up doing five years. A man holds up a bank, by giving the bank staff a note saying he has a gun and to hand over the money. He will likely have to serve close to ten years, even if it's his first offence and was broke. Financial crimes always come with heavier punishments. I would imagine that the only reason file sharers aren't hammered is because it's not a visable financial crime, it's based on assumption, speculation and estimates.

AdrianG wrote:Not really ouch , could have, should have, been a lot harsher.

No, not really. Do some research. According to Swedish law, this penalty is extremely harsh.

They're appealing anyway, and I HIGHLY doubt The Pirate Bay will lose this case once it hits the Swedish Supreme Court.

What's next? Suing Google because you can find torrent sites on Google's search engine?

After that Net Neutrality flies out the window. Believe me, you don't want that.