Pirate Bay – File Sharing Verdict
The Pirate Bay’s trial in Sweden has resulted in their four founders being found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison each, on top of some horrific fines. While we understand that artists are being damaged by file-sharing, it’s certainly in the interest of consumers to obtain music through p2p channels, or they wouldn’t be doing it.
So who is actually at fault here? The Pirate Bay arose in response to a demand from music and media consumers that wasn’t being met by other retailers and content providers, and they were arguably only providing a roadmap for their users to find files that others had put up on the web. Their site was a tool capable of helping people make copies of files, like Microsoft’s Media Player is capable of allowing people to burn copied CD’s of other people’s music, or indeed music that they’ve copied from the internet. It’s not Bill Gate’s fault that millions of people have used Microsoft’s software to burn those CD’s, and it’s arguable that the Pirate Bay’s owners and operators are only providing a tool in the same way.
Whatever the morality of file sharing – it’s here to stay. The Bay have vowed to put up servers in countries all round the world, so that the site cannot be taken down as the result of a judgement in a single territory, and sites like mininova are not only taking down all the contested content, but also paying healthy lumps of tax to their native governments, making them much more respectable in the eyes of the law. What needs to happen is for a method to be designed that brings revenue back to the artists or other content originators from torrents or other file sharing methods, so that consumers can have their cake, and artists can eat it too. My suggestion? Sanctioned releases from labels or artists that are monitored by legit sites (like mininova) and funded by a combination of ISP’s taxing bandwidth, and the torrent tracking site’s advertising.
