/Big Question/ Scurvy dogs
27/05/2009 | Filed under Discover > Big Question
What are your thoughts on the Pirate Bay verdict?
Internet playboy
Drew Curtis
Fark
I thought it was pretty unfair. If they’re going to go after the pirates, they should go after the ninjas as well
Drew is the owner of Fark.com
Ecommerce expert
Ben Dyer
Actinic
It’s been a bad time for pirates. If you’re not getting banged up for linking to a few movies, you’re scanning the horizon to see if the US Navy has their next target painted on you. I guess that there’s a sort of reaping of the whirlwind going on here.
Really, though, I was a disappointed with the whole Pirate Bay affair. Having followed the case closely, I was half expecting the doors of the courtroom to burst open with pirates to the left and the right. Instead, the whole thing seems to have gone down with a whimper. I guess that retro pirates are the only ones engaging in proper skullduggery these days. While I can’t condone piracy, I also can’t help but root for the underdogs. The verdict seems a little suspect, especially as the judge appeared to have a conflict of interest. After all, he is a member of the Swedish copyright association. The hard-handed tactics and tough verdict are likely to strengthen pirate resolve. Expect a team member to be elected to the European Parliament as a protest.
Ben is director of product development at Actinic
Hosting specialist
Neil Barton
Hostway, UK
Filesharing and copyright issues have been one of the most hotly debated online activities over the last decade, since Shawn Fanning developed Napster. Pirate Bay launched in 2003 and despite a plethora of threats, raids and legal issues, the team running the site have only just been brought to trial and sentenced to a year in jail for breaking Swedish copyright law.
Although Pirate Bay does not host copyright material, it does link to it and it has always advocated that it is therefore not in violation of copyright. Indeed, the owners of Pirate Bay seem to delight in explaining this in their responses to legal letters, usually accompanied with their trademark obscene comeback. Furthermore, most of the complaints come from the US and consequently have no power over a Swedish company. Or, as Pirate Bay colourfully puts it, “TPB is hosted in the land of vikings, reindeers, Aurora Borealis and cute blonde girls” ... “US law does not apply here”.
The legality and facts of the situation are certainly ambiguous. After all, BT has never been prosecuted for the content of the phone calls that pass over its network, and neither have email providers been prosecuted for the content of emails. On the other hand, Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader recently had its ‘read out loud’ capability removed because this represented a breach of copyright law. One might say that it would make sense to prosecute the file sharers themselves, who are in clear breach of copyright, rather than the mechanism that helps them to share files.
However, the prevailing feeling seems to be that The Pirate Bay is operating under a legal loophole and the founders know it. Peter Sunde, the site’s spokesperson, has been quoted on the BBC as saying that the “police won’t do anything” and “everybody does it” (ie file sharing). At the end of the day, Pirate Bay does work by facilitating the transfer of copyrighted material, and seeing the array of heavyweights it’s up against, this sentencing may be the first of many and the lifespan of Pirate Bay may well be limited.
Neil is the director of Hostway UK
Media & PR expert
Tim Gibbon
Elemental Communications
Having spent so many years and money on legal costs/court cases, the authorities and other parties that have brought action against The Pirate Bay are probably pleased to see this conviction come to a head, but at what cost? Not only is there the cost of getting it to trial, prosecuting and addressing any appeals (which the founders state that they will do), there is also the media impact to consider. From what I’ve seen broadcast, it doesn’t do much to inform or deter web users from doing what the authorities and content owners/providers don’t wish them to do.
The interview and report broadcast by the BBC was interesting because of the reaction by the founders, but I’m not surprised after seeing the founders interviewed by BBC Click last year. If the founders of The Pirate Bay receive this media attention and there is no real solution in the meeting of law, content providers and other downloading sites, and how they should work together, you have to ask, what was the point and what was achieved here?
The sentence and the outcome don’t serve as a deterrent, and may possibly achieve the complete opposite. Overall, what I’ve seen from this report is a media and PR disaster from the parties that bought the action, evident by the fact that they did not even have much of a voice within this report from a leading news organisation.
In the BBC interview, one of the Pirate Bay founders holds up an IOU of 31million Kronor, approximately £2.6 million. A Wikipedia report claims that The Pirate Bay started in 2003, so I wonder how much revenue it has generated from ads on its site and other funding sources? According to speculation by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 SEK ($65,000/£46,000 per month).
Is this fine just a drop in the ocean for them? I’m not sure, especially as they claim they won’t be paying it anyway. As I write this, the site is still up and running, and for how long – who knows? The site has experienced downtime in the past, but in the short time it’s not going away. There are also a number of competitive sites ready to step up and take its place. If someone has bothered to list the top 900 directories, just imagine how many more there are?
I wonder what would have happened if all parties had met to discuss how they live and work together, or if they ever could/would. Things aren’t changing, they’re evolving, and the only group that seems to be moving with it are users, grabbing anything free, anywhere and in any way they can.
Tim is director of Elemental Communications
Interface guru
Aaron Knol
Fortune Cookie
I think the court verdict was surprising. Pirate Bay doesn’t host any files; instead it provide links to files. Search engines do exactly the same thing so I’m surprised that the service provided by Pirate Bay is considered illegal. That said, everyone knows that piracy is illegal and by deciding to use the name ‘Pirate Bay’, the company must have guessed how the service would be used. It will be interesting to see how this ruling affects search engines, if at all.
Aaron Knol is UI developer for Fortune Cookie
Web standards expert
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo
This will probably be heralded by the film and music industry as a massive success and striking a blow against the piracy sub-culture, but in reality it won’t make much of a difference. There are several other torrent trackers with a similar, if not larger amount of torrents and the very nature of BitTorrent makes it impossible to shut it down. Napster, Kazaa and subsequently Emule showed that whenever you attack piracy from the top down, you just create more versatile, harder to monitor and more distributed systems. The issue is not that people pirate, but that they find the need to pirate. The industry can learn a lot from how piracy networks and distribution works. If you could get a movie as easily for a dollar in high quality as by downloading it from BitTorrent, more people would do it. If you buy a DVD in the US, find no leaflet and no subtitle track and have to hack your computer to even play it back home then you feel ripped off.
Christian works for Yahoo as a web developer, and he’s a self-proclaimed “web standards nut”
Software specialist
Siim Vips
Modera
Piracy is wrong in all the forms it exists. Although cyber piracy and copyright infringement is part of the undoing of major media companies themselves, I believe that going against intellectual or other property rights is not justifiable.
That said, if the major media groups understood what the internet is and the potential it has to offer, and had listened and reacted to advice in time, this situation could have been a lot better than it is now.
It’s always better to agree upon the rules before the game starts. Now we don’t have any other choice than to agree on what the rules will be mid-play, and as the players have been left to play with abandon and without boundaries, they’ve made up their own. As such, these must form part of the governing rules laid down by the umpiring board, so that everyone can continuing playing and getting what they need.
Siim Vips is founder and CEO of Modera
Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications
“I don’t care (if it’s illegal). If I want it, and I can take it, I will.” For me, this quote from one of the founders of The Pirate Bay sums up the mindset of what is often being dubbed ‘generation free’. The content is there, it’s easy to access, and it’s free.
Whilst I’m sure that illegal filesharers know (deep?) in the backs of their minds that what they are doing is wrong, the actual act doesn’t feel like theft. Perhaps that’s because the end product isn’t something tangible they can touch and feel.
The problem that this case highlights is much bigger. The problem is that content owners did not work together and devise a solution on digital rights management (and allow it to adapt as the medium grows) when they had the opportunity to do so 10 years ago. Instead, now, it’s about damage control. They’re like chickens running around with their heads cut off, not sure where to go or what to do.
It could be that rights owners need to monetise content through ISPs or by charging an “all you can eat” fee directly to consumers. I’m just glad it’s not my job to try and come up with the solution, and I’m highly sceptical that there is a way to stamp it out altogether (or even to the extent that it is no longer such an urgent concern).
Many industry people argue that models like Spotify, Hulu and BBC iPlayer are the best possible solutions, and to an extent that’s true. But it’s only part of the answer. Consumers have multiple devices and want to be able to freely take that content to whatever environment they like, whether they want to watch a movie on their PSP or when they’re sat in front of their desktop. And until they’re able to do this legally, they may continue to pirate.
Perhaps, instead of bringing lawsuits that cost God only knows how much to the Swedish taxpayer, they should be investing that money into finding a solution, getting together with people like the founders of The Pirate Bay and other similar services, rights owners, artists and consumers and sitting down to a good old brainstorming session. Who knows, they may even learn a thing or two.
Rachel Hawkes is an account director at Elemental
Project manager
Ane-Marie Peter
on-IDLE
It’s like using a cannon to shoot at a flock of birds. Not only is the sentence a gross overreaction and ‘scapegoating’ exercise, but it has effectively rallied round the ‘pirate community’ in support. The number of Pirate Bay peers has increased to 25million, with 3.5million registered users and just under 150,000 Facebook support group members.
Neither the music nor film industries are approaching digital rights management sensibly, although the industry has had years to test and sort out a strategy. Music is starting to go in the right direction, with just over 50 per cent of downloads now being legal ones, and there is doubt about how negative the effect is on film downloads on new releases, with some arguing that leaked films do better at the box office as interest is fuelled and downloaders still want to experience the final cinema release.
Clearly, the current strategy of pursuing the biggest and scaremongering the many is not effective. It’s human nature to share: downloading is not viewed as a serious crime by the majority of people and content availability is the purpose of the internet. The film industry must find a way to make downloading cost-effective and legal – most people would rather pay a fair amount than steal. Locking up the odd programmer is not going to deter anyone, nor stop the downloads.
Ane-Marie Peter is the co-founder of on-IDLE
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Comments
Chris Moss / 19/06/2009 / 15:57
To be fair Pirate Bay have been mad scape goats for this current PTP issue hanging over everyones heads. The attempts to stop this are futile and will never work, so why not learn to control it. Attack the issue at the source, is my belief. I am not going to touch on the music issues but as for movies appearing prior to release of the torrent sites. Well the parent issues lie with the cinemas and studios. DVD Quality Divx movies prior to public release mean 1 thing. The process the studios use don't work, someone along the line is leaking the source out to the public and is then effected by the snowball effect. All copyright material is subject to the same effect, one person shares it and 5 of their friends download it and share it and 5 of their friends and so on, spirals into 1 song being shared by millions within a matter or hours. Killing PTP won't work for another reason. IM clients file sharing systems and others using web space like Microsoft's SkyDrive™ to hold and share content. Efforts to stop on-line piracy will always fail, but I am not saying give up. Just make it easier and cheaper to purchase electronic items. Buying a song or album for pennies on-line rather than holding a physical item costing £3-10, how much would rather pay? OMG I lost my CD or it got scratched, i need to go and buy another or ooops i deleted my album... I just jump on getyourmoosicormovieshere.com and redownload it again for free. phew. There are solutions to minimise on-line piracy, but publishers need to wake up and get with the times. People are not going to pay over the odds for something they can get for free or for very little costs, regardless of the risks.
Vicky Walsh / 30/06/2009 / 13:44 / http://www.vkw91.co.uk
It actually brought a tear to my eye. Back in the ol' days, people used to record songs off the radio on to cassette tapes, and downloading is just the modern day version of that.
People never removed the record button from tape players did they....
