April 17th, 2009
The Pirate Bay torpedoed
A Swedish court has jailed four men behind the infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were convicted of breaking copyright law and sentenced to a year in prison. They were also ordered to pay 30 million Kronors (about $3.5 million) in damages.
The Pirate Bay site is still sailing and the four have said previously that they would appeal if convicted.
While I don’t condone piracy, I really can’t see how a prosecution against the Pirate Bay would have done much to combat illegal file sharing. Also, it’s important to remember that no copyrighted material is being held by The Pirate Bay, and the site is essentially just a search engine (as an aside I can find plenty of copyrighted material that’s distributed without the copyright holder’s consent using a search engine such as Google …). Seems to me it would make more sense to go after the file sharers themselves.
I think that ultimately the legal route isn’t going to be what works, because even if The Pirate Bay went offline tomorrow, another site would spring up to replace it. Eventually the entertainment industry is going to have to modernize business models and foster new income streams.
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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| 04/17/09
