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The Pirate Bay: Is it illegal to point?

Started by mathewi · 11 months ago

In one of the least-surprising legal moves in recent memory, Swedish authorities have laid charges against The Pirate Bay, one of the largest trackers of BitTorrent downloads in the world (it recently passed the 10 million peers mark), on behalf of several movie studios and record labels. ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • the same can be said for the Qtrax Browser ...the Songbird browser they use scrapes every web page it visits for audio files and automatically pops up a very easy to use download manger .
  • That's a good point, Matt -- Songbird arguably engages in contributory
    infringement as well, at least as much as Songza or Seeqpod. And so does
    the Yahoo music player they recently introduced that adds a javascript
    player to any page with mp3 files in it.
  • Great perspective about the challenges. Linked to it on my blog.
  • Thanks, Corvida.
  • That kind of "pointing" has been ruled illegal in several European courts as aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and I don't see why Sweden would be so very different. What's relevant here is "intent". And it's going to be hard for the PB guys to credibly deny their intent...

    Then again, it's never been quite clear to my why they felt so safe in Sweden, and why it has taken so long for them to be prosecuted. There must be some kind of loophole in Swedish law.

    Personally, I hope they win, but I find it hard to believe that under current copyright laws Pirate Bay can be legal in any western country.

    What's more worrying, if PB goes down it might trigger the next fase in the P2P arms race, like with Napster and Kazaa before. The ultimate result will inevitably be an anonymized, end to end encrypted, zero point of failure. 'all the data is in the clound' p2p network, with implications for law enforcement (ie, making it damn near impossible) well beyond mere copyright infringement.
  • i love piratebay it dosent hert enything if they do get sewd there are still thosends of more just like it ther fing stuped

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