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The Pirate Bay is (surprise!) guilty of pirating, but what about Google?
8 comments- TAGS:file sharing, guilty, illegal, Pirate Bay, Sweden
- IT TOPICS:Cybercrime & Hacking, Internet
A Swedish court today found the Pirate Bay guilty of copyright infringement, otherwise known as pirating (surprise!). With all the news lately of pirates capturing ships off the Somali coast, it's easy to forget that online pirates are out there as well.
Well, perhaps "Pirates" is too harsh a term. These guys aren't kidnapping people at gunpoint, holding prisoners for ransom nor are they getting in gunfights with the US military. What they were doing was making it easier for Internet users to share copyrighted music and videos (and software) illegally.
The fines were relatively harsh for the four founders of the Pirate Bay. Each got a year in prison and combined, they have to cough up $3.6 million to the Swedish arms of the major global entertainment firms. They, of course, will be appealing the ruling and according to Peter Sunde would rather burn the money than pay the entertainment companies.
They also say that what the Pirate Bay does is no different from Google. From a legal standpoint, I really have to agree. They obviously cater their results towards Pirates, but technically they don't host the files, they don't download the files, nor do they tell people to download copyrighted material.
In fact, much of what's on the Pirate Bay is not copyrighted material and if you look at torrenting in general, there are many many legitimate uses of the technology. Linux OS software distribution comes to mind. Legitimate movie distribution is also another use. Popular video viewing software, Joost, uses torrents to distribute video. So does Vuze.
Obviously, from a logical standpoint they are certainly aiding and abetting people who are stealing from the entertainment companies. The problem is that by setting this president, the Swedish court is opening up Google, Microsoft Live search, and Yahoo to similar such actions from the entertainment industry.
If I do a Google search for "James Bond Torrent", I get 656,000 results. Most of the first few pages are links to other torrent trackers. there are hundreds of them.
There is no real way for companies like Google to police their search engine for illegal torrent downloads. They could hide all .torrent files, but then users could change these names to .tortor files or something. It is literally impossible.
I would offer this suggestion: The music industry was able to do much better against the pirates by selling songs at a good $.99 value than they ever did with lawsuits.
I'm not sure the Swedish appeals court can hold up this ruling based on its technical merits alone. So entertainment companies might want to look into a better plan B.
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