Pirate Bay hopes for a full flotilla

Possibly not the Christmas Present the copyright industry was hoping for: The Pirate Bay has released its source code into the open so anyone who fancies running a mini Pirate Bay can do so.

It's a response to Swedish police - acting on behalf of the private companies which control copyrights - closing the site down last week and, therefore, something like the 795th time the music and film industry have learned the lesson that file sharing isn't something you can just send policemen and lawyers to fix.

Sky Broadband casts itself as wheezy cat; Pirate Bay proxies as mice

Sky Broadband has started to block access to Pirate Bay proxy sites, in a bid to inspire the creation of other Pirate Bay proxy sites ("defeat unlicensed file sharing once and for all").

Pirate Bay calls copyright cops on themselves

Some lovely work by the Pirate Bay in Finland. The Finnish copyright police have built a parody of their site, and the Bay have called the copyright police:

“While The Pirate Bay may have a positive view on copying, it will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright,” Pirate Bay’s Winston says in a comment.

“CIAPC is like an ugly high school bully without friends. It’s time to take a stand. Cyber bullying is a serious matter to us all,” Winston continues.

Boing Boing points out that the Pirate Bay can't help but come out ahead on this:

I love that even if they lose, it will establish the case for a parody exception to Finnish copyright law, which The Pirate Bay supports and which CIAPC vehemently opposes.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Pirate Party UK ducks fight with BPI

The Pirate Party UK has closed its proxy access to The Pirate Bay, rather than face a ruinous battle with the major labels.

The decision came after the BPI chose to make its battle personal - rather than attacking the party, the BPI chose to take action against six individual members of the organisation.

Obviously, the BPI is legally within its rights to do this, but it distorts the battle - a well-funded music industry business against private individuals stacks the odds completely in the favour of the business, making it effectively an impossible fight.

UK ISPs blocking licenced material

Have you come across The Promo Bay yet? It's a spin-off from The Pirate Bay activities, where artists across a range of endeavours submit their content, willingly and happily, in the hope of being picked up for wider exposure.

Except they're not getting the exposure, in the UK at least, because UK ISPs are blocking them. TorrentFreak reports:

Promo Bay’s Will Dayble believes his site has ended up on some of the ISPs’ blocklists “by accident”.

“These providers are pretty monolithic and old school, I’d imagine it’s just a broad-scale block against a bunch of Pirate Bay properties and we fell under the net. I doubt it’s a pointed move against the Promo Bay in particular,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

But that would imply that blocking - far from being the scalpel-like weapon it's claimed to be - is like a blunderbuss strapped to a hammer.

The Pirate Bay blocking is at the behest of the BPI, who claim to be doing it in the interests of copyright holders. But their block is interfering with other copyright holders' rights to distribute their material as they choose.

BPI take on the UK Pirate Party

Since the BPI's miserable failure to try and close down access to The Pirate Bay, the UK variant of the Pirate Party has been running a proxy service.

The BPI is now trying to get that closed, too, reports Torrent Freak:

Referencing the Party’s pro-freedom stance, [Geoff] Taylor apparently told Kaye, “Freedom of expression is not an absolute right. It comes with a duty to respect the rights of others, including those whose talent, hard work and investment help to create music and other entertainment.”

That's so true - who can forget how Evelyn Beatrice Hall caught Voltaire's stance - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, providing you don't somehow impinge on an investment by Vivendi while you're doing it."

It's not clear how far the BPI intend to take this - The Pirate Party UK say they've only had a vague email so far, and no formal demand; given how trying to stop people in the UK going to the Pirate Bay resulted in a massive upswing in traffic to the site and the government going cool on the idea of blocking webpages, a wise organisation might choose to do nothing.

But then, when has the BPI ever been wise?

Sweden at the heart of contentious website-related extradtion drama

No, no, not the Steve Martin lookalike holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. Sweden have had Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm arrested in Cambodia.

There isn't an extradition agreement between Cambodia and Sweden, but TorrentFreak suggest that might not be a problem if Cambodia want shot of Svartholm.

Copyright industry now officially Charlie Brown to Pirate Bay's Lucy

You could almost feel sorry for BREIN, who tramp off to the courts to have Pirate Bay IP addresses blocked, only to discover that The Pirate Bay adds a new IP address.

To their cussed credit, rather than giving in on a battle they can't win, the Dutch collection agency takes another run up. Maybe one day, Lucy won't pull the football away, guys. One day.

The British music industry discovers what victory tastes like

How has the battle against The Pirate Bay gone? The BPI's expensive legal blockade might not be a roaring success, according to TorrentFreak:

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay had 12 million more visitors than it has ever had, providing a golden opportunity to educate users on how to circumvent blocks. “We should write a thank you letter to the BPI,” a site insider told TorrentFreak.

Great news, then: in effect, the BPI have spent a small fortune on giving the Pirate Bay a luxurious advertising campaign.

I was amused to spot on Saturday that the BPI share a doorway with the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial fund - the charity which lost a fortune pursuing a pointless battle against a manufacturer of tacky plates. You have to wonder if the two organisations swap legal advice when they bump into each other in the corridors.

Pirates repelled

The BPI has won a historic High Court judgement forcing UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay.

This isn't great news - the idea of access to any website being blocked on the say-so of a cartel run by three-and-a-half multinational organisations would always be an affront to natural justice - but, obviously, the BPI are delighted:

BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale.

"Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them.

"This is wrong - musicians, sound engineers and video editors deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else."

Geoff Taylor must know, in his heart, that this isn't a win, though. It's not even locking a stable door after the horses have bolted; it's turning up at stables that have long since been turned into holiday homes and putting up a 'No bolting' sign.

Not a single extra penny will find its way to a sound engineer as a result of this; the only people making money are lawyers. So much effort still being poured into a policy that failed in the early days of the century.

Guardian columnist calls for UK ISPs to be overseen by foreign courts

There's another clunking piece by Helienne Lindvall on the MediaGuardian website following the failure of the Pirate Bay appeal.

Helienne spots that the court judgement against The Pirate Bay doesn't really make much difference, because the search engine has just moved its base from Scandinavia to the Far East. Rather than think 'hmm, that means that taking an approach which tries to just close Pirate Bay down which turns into a massive game of whack-a-mole wasting time and resources which could be better used in other ways', Lindvall's response is that what is needed is just more legal sanction.

After all, a Swedish court can only deal with crimes committed within its jurisdiction.

Up to point. If there is a desire for a national court to deal with alleged crimes which take place outside its boundaries, then laws can be drafted to that effect - for example, this has happened with sex tourism crimes.

I agree with Per Strömbäck of the Swedish thinktank Netopia when he says intermediaries such as internet service providers have to take more responsibility. Once a court has established that a site is committing illegal activities, the ISPs should have a duty to block that site, using technical methods that are similar to those used to protect against viruses, so that it wouldn't be an invasion of personal privacy. Without the co-operation of the ISPs and other intermediaries, even a conviction by the supreme court is toothless when it comes to the internet.

You could argue that an ISP should obey the injunctions of its home court, but what Hel is after is for ISPs to block access to websites which have been found guilty of "illegal activities".

Earlier on in her piece, Lindvall attacks the Bay team for responding to complaints in childish terms, and then she goes on to float this idea which sounds like something out of a Newsround debate.

A foreign court says that a website does something illegal, so it must be blocked automatically by an ISP.

So, say, a court in a nation which has made homosexuality illegal finds a health site "guilty" for its safer sex advice - BT would be forced to block that in the UK.

A totalitarian government's puppet courts finds Google guilty of sedition for linking to opposition parties? Talk Talk would be obliged to row-in and slap a block on the site.

It's somewhat unpleasant, and plainly absurd. Unless all Lindvall means is that she wants ISPs to sometimes block some sites which are found guilty of some crimes in some states. Which is alright in principle - why not try and come up with a list, and think about seeing if you can find an MP to introduce legislation, rather than calling on telecommunications companies to act as censors?

Of course, it'd be a waste of time. Even if UK ISPs were obliged to comply with Swedish court rulings on matters of copyright, how would a legally-enforceable block on the Swedish Pirate Bay also apply to the 'new' Pirate Bay overseas? They've moved to a place where they're not behaving illegally - so would an ISP be somehow obliged to block a website that hasn't been found guilty of any crime in the place where it's located?

Or would the fact that this is the Pirate Bay, which has been convicted elsewhere, be enough to trigger a ban?

But what if they'd reopened not as The Pirate Bay, but, say, Long John Silver's Website? Would the organisation being the same be enough to trigger the block?

So how about if the ownership details changed slightly? Say, to the owner's cousins?

Would the ISPs then be somehow supposed to block access to a site operating legally on its home territory, run by unconvicted people, under a different brand?

Wherever you stand on the moral question, it's clear that such an approach cannot work.

Lindvall finishes with this:

But, more importantly, the question is: how do we protect the individual's legal rights when corporations, such as many ISPs, refuse to take any responsibility for what goes through their pipes? Till we deal with that issue, I'm afraid legal convictions, such as this one, mean very little.

Copyright is very important to some people. Fair enough. But a much more important principle is that ISPs should not be held accountable for what goes through "their pipes" - because we don't want BT to get sued for the thoughts of their customers; we don't want TalkTalk deciding to not to carry certain traffic because they'd be treated as a publisher rather than a dumb pipe.

However urgently you believe that making a few more quid for Chris Martin is vital, that idea - that the responsibility for what appears online should belong to the people putting it online, not the people who run the infrastructure - is much, much important.

If Helienne Lindvall believes that the operators of the M6 toll should be stopping lorries carrying counterfeit CDs from driving up its roadway, then her views would at least be consistent. But I think she'd admit that is a crazy idea, and the only result would be lorries taking different routes while everyone else is inconvenienced and frustrated. Why can't she see the metaphor holds just as firmly online?

The Pirate Bay buries its tracker

The Pirate Bay has announced that its torrent tracker is down and never coming back.

Not, they rush to stress, because of the legal actions brought against them. No, it's because just as how Napster really outlived its usefulness as you no longer needed a server, the trackers themselves are now passe:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

In fact, the Pirate Bay are in talks with torrenting sites to encourage the eradication of torrents altogether:

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

The record labels have got what they wanted. But it's not quite what they were hoping for.

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.

Pirate Bay flogs itself off

The music industry has finally had its victory over Pirate Bay - its owners have concluded its value is in the brand and not the service, and flogged it all off to a software company:

Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site" said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

"The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers' need faster downloads and better quality" continues Hans Pandeya.

Boing Boing's thoughts on this are pretty much what ours were when we heard about the deal - isn't this the selfsame idea that drove the sale of the Napster brand? And how did that turn out, exactly?

Brokep has also issued a statement:

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site. As all of you know, there's not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It's the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen.

We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of us.

It's not clear from this if the new owners are also buying the liabilities of the site - which could weigh down any plans to go legitimate.

Trouble is, if the current Pirate Bay team think "the new owners won't wreck the site, because they'll lose the visitors", that is at best naive - clearly, the new owners think "people will keep coming because of the name." It's all going to end in bitter tears and painful recriminations, isn't it?

[Thanks to Michael M]

Pirate Bay judge in no way biased

Attempts to get the judgement against the Pirate Bay set aside have come to nothing, as a higher court has ruled that the judge wasn't biased:

A Swedish court ruled that judge Tomas Norstrom was not biased against the Pirate Bay despite being a member of several groups that lobby for the rights of copyright holders

How so?

Surprisingly, the opinion isn't that Norstrom could, as a professional, set aside his membership and bring an impartial view. Oh, no: the court seems to have concluded that the judge wasn't actually really a member so much as an observer:

The court said Norstrom joined the associations to keep abreast of copyright issues and that it found no evidence of bias.

He was only there for research? Isn't that the defence in a different sort of computer crime?

Curiously, Nosrtrom doesn't appear to have done any of this "research" in groups that don't lobby on behalf of copyright holders, so even if he was "researching", it looks oddly like research done without an entirely open mind.

Still, lets hope he never finds himself hearing a case where he has to offer a judgement on a murderous cabal. If he has to join in to discover what he's thinking about, it could get messy.

Pirate Bay witnesses turn Pirate Bay proponents

During the Pirate Bay trial, one of the acts used by the music industry to make its case against the evil, evil men was Advanced Patrol.

However, it turns out nobody asked Advanced Patrol if they wanted to be used as part of the prosecution, and so now they've issued an angry press release and a new album. An album available, solely, through Pirate Bay:

“We never asked to be plaintiffs in this case, they used us as a weapon in a fight in which we don’t wish to participate. We refuse to be used in a war against our fans!” says Gonza from the band. “You cannot legislate away file sharing, Gonza says. Those who share our music are also those who appreciate it the most. They are my friends, and friendship is something to be valued highly. That’s why we’re giving away El Futuro to the internet, to our friends.”

Remember, remember: everything the RIAA does, it does because it cares about the artists.

PRS says that there's some file sharing going on

The PRS has spent a little more of songwriter's money on a big report that announces that there's a whole lot of unlicensed music transfers going on:

The songs of popular musicians like Lady Gaga have been passed on 14 million times each in one year alone with no payment to the artist, according to a report by PRS for Music, the organisation that collects royalties for songwriters and composers.

That clunkily-written standfirst suggests that this is basically a report which attempts to stick a made-up number on downloading. And it is. Oddly, the actual report doesn't appear to be on the PRS website at the moment, which means we are stuck seeing it through the Telegraph's eyes:

The research involved analysing billions of swaps on global music sites like Pirate Bay and its findings illustrate just how rampant illegal filesharing has become.

On average the most popular files were swapped over 14 million times for the twelve-month period.

What does that actually mean, though - "on average"? And how were these "billions" of swaps get "analysed"? And how, exactly, were any of these swaps "on" Pirate Bay?

The Telegraph piece is written by Urmee Khan, who has the title Digital and Media Correspondent, and yet they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the Pirate Bay works. It's a bit like having an agricultural correspondent who says that potatoes grow on bushes - it's near enough, but suspiciously wrong.

According to the authors, the Pirate Bay trial - where its founders were jailed - did little to dampen illegal activity from the popular site which advises people on the best ways to download the latest films, music and video games.

It's a search engine, Urmee. Yes, there is a 'how do I download' page, but it's very basic.

And the founders have been given a prison sentence, but haven't yet, actually, been jailed.

Still, it's nice to see the PRS has spent songwriter money on an expensive survey which just confirms that the Pirate Bay trial did not a piece of good for anyone's bottom line. Indeed, it's hard to see what the point of this work is at all. Lots of people share files, and many of those files result in no payment going to the artist. Do they think that there is anyone on the planet who would care about this, and yet doesn't know?

I get that the PRS thinks that, by saying "ooh, there's millions of swaps every second", they'll spark some of sort of crackdown, but really they're doing the opposite. Sticking out a press release which shows that billions of files are being swapped all the time, and that even a high-profile prison sentence can't dent the levels of activity, really just underlines how the PRS and the RIAA have totally lost. This should spark a big shake-up - but the shake-up is needed for the copyright capitalists to admit their business has changed forever.

Google explain why they're not The Pirate Bay

The first official defence of Google in response to the mutterings that there's little difference between them and the Pirate Bay, has appeared. Somewhat surprisingly, rather than coming from the Googleplex, it's appeared on the Google Italian blog [Italian version]:

La missione di Google è indicizzare e rendere disponibili tutte le informazioni presenti online, questo indipendentemente dai formati in cui questi file sono messi online.

Google's mission is to index and make available all information online, regardless of the formats in which these files are placed online.

I formati dei file non sono di per sé illeciti, ma è l'uso che se ne fa che li qualifica come tali.

The file formats are not in themselves illegal, but the use to which it is put to them as such.

Per fare un esempio Google è come un'autostrada sulla quali circolano molte autovetture (i contenuti); Google non può essere considerato responsabile se con una di queste automobili viene commesso un crimine e nemmeno lo è l'automobile di per sé.

For example Google is like a highway on which cars are moving much (content) and Google can not be held responsible if one of these cars is a crime committed, nor is the car itself.

Per venire incontro alle esigenze dei titolari di diritti di proprietà intellettuale, Google ha pensato una serie di procedure che permettono di segnalare e rimuovere i contenuti presenti sul proprio motore di ricerca per violazione del copyright.

To meet the needs of holders of intellectual property rights, Google has designed a set of procedures for reporting and removing the content on its search engine of copyright infringement.

Per quanto riguarda YouTube, invece, abbiamo sviluppato Con ContentID , una funzionalità che consente a chi detiene i diritti dei contenuti di monitorarli, gestirli ed eventualmente bloccarli.

Regarding YouTube, however, we have developed with contentId, a feature that allows holders of the rights of content to monitor, manage and eventually block them.

Con ContentID , infatti, è possibile agire anche sui contenuti caricati da terzi che violino il proprio diritto di copyright, non solo bloccando tali contenuti ma anche scegliendo di monetizzarli.

With contentId fact, you can also act on the content uploaded by third parties who infringe their copyright, not only blocking illegal content but also choose to monetise.

Un'opzione, scelta dalla grande maggioranza dei nostri partner, che indica un'evoluzione delle modalità di esercizio del proprio diritto in direzione di un nuovo modello di business.

An option, chosen by the vast majority of our partners, indicating a change in exercise of its right in the direction of a new business model.

I'm not quite sure I follow why, if Google can't be held responsible for illegal cars or crime taking place in those cars, that Google will also intervene to take those cars off the road, but perhaps that's because it's a weak translation of a poorly-considered metaphor.

The Pirate Google

The question raised as Judge Ilovemesomecopyrights threw The Pirate Bay team into prison (or, at least, a long, drawn-out, process of appeals) was why the IFPI was targeting one search engine while not having a pop at Google.

There are two answers: first, Google could theoretically buy the four major labels without breaking much of a sweat and where would the IFPI be then? But, secondly, and more seriously, Google could find it much easier to argue - under US law - that it's just offering a search, and if people use it to search for things they shouldn't, well, that might be regrettable but is hardly their fault.

As if to test this hypothesis comes The PIrate Google:

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

What the organisers of this site seem to have missed is that, effectively, they're doing what The Pirate Bay did and what Google doesn't - building a search that expressly looks for torrents. So, rather than suggesting the IFPI goes after Google rather than the little guy, aren't they just making themselves targets?

[via Everything Is Miscellaneous]

IFPI lawyer waves to us from the other side of the looking-glass

With The Pirate Bay still happily buzzing away on the internet, the prospect of more cash-burning appeals processes to grind through, and even the chance that the judge who heard the case might turn out to have been so far from disinterested as to spark a retrial, you'd have thought that even the IFPI would be admitting all they've really done in Sweden is raise awareness of the word "Pyrrhic".

But no: Jo Oliver, general counsel to the IFPI, it's all looking great now. And, yes, that's Jo Oliver - it's not John Oliver taking the piss:

Billboard: You obviously won the argument inside the courtroom, but in light of the pro-Pirate Bay protests in Sweden, do you feel you won it outside as well?

Jo Oliver: The individuals behind the Pirate Bay have certainly been able to paint themselves as Internet freedom fighters, and they have some public sympathy with a certain portion of, in particular, the Swedish population. But we certainly think that, throughout this trial, there has been less and less sympathy for that position because it's become clear that these guys were deliberately engaged in this operation. It wasn't something they were doing for fun on the side in their bedrooms. It was a commercial enterprise. They intended to facilitate copyright infringement, they intended to make money from it, and they did.

So, even while acknowledging that the sledgehammer-judgement generated public sympathy, Oliver seems to think that somehow they achieved the opposite.

Billboard asks what will happen next:

Oliver: It will have a huge impact, particularly against BitTorrent sites and services. In cases like Grokster in the U.S., U.S. law doesn't apply everywhere, but that was a hugely influential decision (by the United States Supreme Court in 2005, which led to Grokster's closing of its site), and peer-to-peer services don't operate in the same way anymore because of that decision. I think the same will apply to BitTorrent services following the Pirate Bay decision.

Ow ow ow... sorry, I think I just cartoon-rubbed my eyes a little too much. Oliver is using the "success" of closing down Grokster four years ago as a model for what happens next? You mean, Jo, the time when you actually closed down a service, and it had no effect at all upon the volume of unlicensed music? That's your hope?

It's a bit like deciding to take your sick cat to the vet whose slip killed your dog, isn't it?

But, it turns out, the closure of Grokster and Napster weren't miserable failures:

I don't necessarily agree that other cases haven't had an impact. They've certainly changed the way people can operate on the Internet.

By inventing a piece of armour that stopped them stabbing us with small knives, we won an important victory, as they then had to invent the blunderbuss.

We have market-by-market statistics and, in some cases, P2P has been contained against the growth of broadband penetration, so there's different ways of cutting the numbers.

Only "in some cases", then? And can you actually prove that in those cases, this has anything to do with your activities, or is it just that later adopters of broadband are people who are less interested in exploring all the possibilities of the internet and so less likely to be installing bittorrent clients anyway?

The Pirate Bay was an incredibly popular service that has a certain symbolic importance.

That does suggest that, contrary to the claimed importance of closing down the earlier services, Oliver is now admitting that there was no real impact.

When Billboard challenges Oliver's claim that what we have here is a "very important precedent", she changes tack a little:

Billboard: But Napster and Kazaa were important legal precedents as well and other sites sprang up to take their place. What's different this time?

Oliver: Parallel with the development of the legal cases against sites like the Pirate Bay, we've also seen a huge increase in the number of options available (to access digital music) legally, which certainly wasn't the case around the time of the Napster case. There weren't the myriad of options that there are available now, like Spotify or Nokia (Comes With Music). You can't have a legitimate market unless those who don't have a license are stopped.

You'll note the tangential admission that the music industry dropped the ball totally by not getting a legal option in place a decade ago, but here again Oliver is managing to both elude the question and misrepresent the truth in one move.

Given that the 'precedents' of Napster and the others were still extant, it's not entirely clear why another precedent would make any difference this time. And can any intelligent person really claim that "you can't have a legitimate market" while unlicensed music is swapped with the sales generated by iTunes, Amazon and the smaller services? That Apple alone have sold billions of songs while The Pirate Bay has been bobbing about shows that simply isn't true. Perhaps Oliver hasn't quite understood that what licensed services sell is not downloads, but convenience and quality.

But you couldn't be counsel for a business organisation if you didn't understand what the business was, could you?