Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The music industry feels the win

Oh, the price of victory. It's escaped few observers that one of the main outcomes of the Pirate Bay judgement was to generate hours and hours of media coverage for the Pirate Bay and its services.

But still, the imminent closure of the servers will make up for the IFPI effectively bankrolling acres of advertising and a huge brand-awareness campaign, right?

Well... probably not: the Pirate Bay team have embarked on an appeals process, which could drag on for years. And, under Swedish law, the Pirate Bay won't have to be switched off until all legal avenues of appeal have been exhausted.

But, still, John Kennedy - you'd have known that would have happened before everyone started off firing legal complaints, right? Right?


4 comments:

Black Jay said...

I love Pirate Bay but they are really up against it! but as you say looks like we'll get a few more years out of 'em whilst they appeal!
Really informative blog by the way!

acb said...

They can keep track of everyone who visits The Pirate Bay. Then a few highly publicised search-and-seizure raids, with the press releases making clear that the targets were mere Pirate Bay users, should scare people straight (or underground). Meanwhile, they can send home the message that if you so much as go to the website, you're putting your name in the IFPI raid lottery. Few people would have their home computers so clean of contraband that they wouldn't end up owing massively inflated damages should an IFPI/MediaSentry forensics team have a few days to go over their hard drives.

Anonymous said...

Over the last week the problem I've been having is why they don't go after sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload. Not only are they filled with illegal downloads but they are also making money from users who are likely accessing these files. I know that there was some legal case against them in Germany and that they have some sort of laughable security measures to prevent certain files being uploaded but they don't seem to get much attention. You could argue that the sites were set up with other intentions (much like people have in the last week been arguing against Google being an example of a torrent indexing site) but it seems like it would be pretty easy to find out if the sites are profiting from the people uploading these files. As far as I can see what those sites are doing is far worse than any "crime" that TPB has committed in that they are actually making money from ripping off artists.

Olive said...

It's worth noting that Pirate Bay didn't actually host any material to which they didn't hold the copyright, unlike say, ooh, I don't know, YouTube, to pick an example entirely at random.

@Andrew: IP Anonymisers, TOR and TrueCrypt are your friends.

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