TAG | ABBA, King Kong, datanörd and the entertainment industry walked into a bar ... |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 22 February 2009 | |
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The content distributed by the Pirate Bay is not necessarily unique – movies, games, software application, tv shows, music – all can be found throughout the Internet distributed by Web, by FTP, by Usenet, and by many other peer-to-peer technologies. Perhaps I really ought to say the content whose distribution is facilitated by the Pirate Bay – a sizeable portion of their defence is that the Pirate Bay does not distribute these items but merely torrent files which are, in themself, merely parcels of data that link people to each other with no copyright-breaching contents. Nevertheless, while the content hosted by the Pirate Bay is unremarkable where the site has proven itself different to the rest is by its sheer longevity. Just a decade ago Napster was pursued for enabling peer-to-peer distribution of copyrighted materials. Passionate defenders argued Napster was just a vehicle; you might as well damn Firefox or Microsoft Outlook or Filezilla seeing as copyright-infringing items can be obtained through the Web, e-mail and FTP too. Nevertheless, Napster closed its doors (and re-opened as a different, legitimate platform.) Kazaa was another peer-to-peer application and it suffered a similar fate. Elsewhere, torrent distribution and search sites like suprnova.org, torrentspy.com and demonoid.com chose to shut down rather than go to court in the face of looming legal pressure. Not so the Pirate Bay. A mainstay of their site has always been the publishing of legal threats along with acidic responses. This has presumably exacerbated the ire held towards the Pirate Bay team by film and music producers and distributors worldwide. Not only, they believe, do the Pirate Bay infringe their copyright but they have been thumbing their nose at attempts to bring them under control. In 2006 the Pirate Bay’s servers were raided by Swedish police, allegedly due to pressure placed on the Minister of Justice by U.S. legislators in Washington DC, themself under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA.) This raid adversely affected the finances of over 100 other, totally unrelated, companies hosting equipment at the same co-location centre. Swedish/UK company, GameSwitch, issued a press release that stated 50 police officers removed an entire building of hardware without discriminating in any way between those of the Pirate Bay and unrelated entities. GameSwitch described this as a massive blow and an irrational police action and made reference to the government’s display of “ill-considered foreign appeasement.” This wasn’t the end of the matter. |
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