Music industry policy in action

Well done, the music industry. Your efforts to close down the Pirate Bay might have cost you a fortune in legal brain-hire, and might not have actually have done more than take the site down for spurts, but still: You made your point, right?

Sure, what you also did was lead to a increase in the number of Pirate Bay-alike sites doing the same job, but in a more distributed fashion. But you made your point. Like when you closed Napster down, and wound up with helping the drive to filesharing in the first place.

According to [McAfee security analyst Greg] Day, in the days prior to the shutdown, treasure-hunters used anonymising software to gain access and copy the indexes that Pirate Bay used to redirect users to other computers hosting torrents.

Once the indexed data was in the public domain, open-source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of torrents. While the Pirate Bay was offline there were four times as many sites offering access to the torrents.

Well done, the music industry. Well done.