Pirate Bay: a guilty verdict is an attack on the Internet

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/pirate-bay-a-guilty-verdict-is-an-attack-on-the-internet.ars

by bep • 17 years ago

20 29 17 years ago

arstechnica.com

Hexstream• 17 years ago

Verb tense fail.

A guilty verdict WOULD BE an attack on the Internet...

adnam• 17 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fbrUjjivw :)

ph0rque• 17 years ago

Or, as the Germans say, "wäre".

tptacek4• 17 years ago

I don't really know what to think about this trial, but I don't like it when stories insult my intelligence by implying that there is some doubt as to whether The Pirate Bay is mostly used for copyright violation. There would be no Pirate Bay without "pirated" movies and TV shows.

harpastum2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure how you can assert that there is _zero_ doubt as to the pirate bay being used mostly to violate copyright. It would be a breach of journalistic integrity to state that "everyone knows that the pirate bay is only for getting copyrighted content illegally," or any statement similar to that.

As such, the story states: "As for The Pirate Bay, the argument might be made that nearly all of its popular downloads are in fact illegal." The story continues by commenting that there is "somewhat shockingly...[no] sort of survey of site content." I fail to see how this is an insult to your intelligence, rather than simply unbiased reporting.

tptacek4• 17 years ago

The article spends two grafs on the "question" (the prosecution asserts [em. original] that...) of whether The Pirate Bay mostly traffics in unlawful content, at one point pulling out a statistic that claims the opposite is true and pointedly noting that the statistic hadn't been refuted.

If you want to make the argument that it's a shoddy prosecution, fine. That wasn't my read of the story. My read was, "maybe The Pirate Bay is used legitimately as often as it is abused for copyright violation". If I'm expected to believe that's even "maybe" true, I'm a bit offended.

d0mine2• 17 years ago

In fact, the only person to present such evidence was defendant Peter Sunde, who claimed that a survey of his own showed that 80 percent of the 1,000 .torrent files he examined appeared to point toward material that was legal to distribute. </quote>

Do you know a source that provides different data?

tjic• 17 years ago

If a pawn shop in my neighborhood carried 80% legally sold items, and 20% stolen items, there'd be zero doubt that the owner was intentionally acting as a fence, and was helping create the demand that was causing local burglaries.

20% stolen content is HUGE.

rms2• 17 years ago

http://thepiratebay.org/top/all

andreyf• 17 years ago

...as to whether The Pirate Bay is mostly used for copyright violation.

That's irrelevant. The question is whether TPB is breaking any laws. One can provide a technology or service which users use as a means for illegal activity without being held responsible. In the US, as far as I know, one has to "distribute a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright" [1] in order to be held liable.

As I understand it, Swedish laws are a lot more lenient.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_....

tptacek4• 17 years ago

Ok, in fact, what you're saying is irrelevant. I'm explicitly not talking about whether the prosecution is justified. I'm questioning whether this journalist is justified in portraying the makeup of Pirate Bay torrents as controversial. The Pirate Bay exists almost entirely to further copyright violation.

Maybe that shouldn't be illegal, or even unlawful. I don't care. But don't tell me The Pirate Bay is mostly there to move Ubuntu.

jrockway• 17 years ago

There would be no Pirate Bay without "pirated" movies and TV shows.

You are probably right, but the prosecution didn't have any admissible evidence to this effect.

Similarly, gun manufacturers are not liable for murders committed with their guns; even though they train people how to use them to kill others. Providing the public with tools that can be used to commit crimes is not a crime. That is what this trial is about.

Finally, it has not been proven in court that redistributing TV shows on BitTorrent is illegal, and it certainly hasn't been shown that telling people where to get said shows is illegal.

tptacek4• 17 years ago

If we can just start from a place that is honest about what The Pirate Bay is doing, I don't care what conclusion we reach.

chris112• 17 years ago

I really don't think that the story was implying that TPB is mostly used for legal downloading. It was just saying that the prosecution has not shown a lot of evidence that TPB is mostly used for piracy.

I believe that the founders of TPB have a philosophical problem with copyright, and created TPB to actively support piracy. But that belief is not legal proof that the TPB's main purpose is to support privacy. And that's all the prosecution presented, a belief. They didn't do any kind of site survey of the legality of the torrents.

Peter Sunde is the only one to provide any kind of stats. Now I would be interested in knowing how he got his stats (he definitely didn't use the Top 100 in the survey selection), but the prosecution didn't rebut it with any kind of statistics of their own.

It's kind of like if a DA decided to prosecute Mick Jagger for drug use, but didn't look for any drugs or do any drug tests. Mick Jagger has been convicted for drug use and has admitted to using drugs, and I would believe that he still does. But that belief should not be the basis for a conviction sentence.

And I am convinced that TPB can be used legally, for example downloading linux distros. So one of the major questions is whether TPB has the legal responsibility to police itself and respond to requests to remove user submitted files. And any verdict would have big implications for website owners.

So to sum it up, I believe that most people use the TPB to break the law. But the site was created with a good understanding of local copyright law. And so the most anyone could say is that it is in a legal grey zone.

Pirate Bay: a guilty verdict is an attack on the Internet

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