I’m not an advocate of illegally downloading content regardless of format, but I think most people have done it at some point. Last week the worlds largest bit torrent tracker site “The Pirate Bay” saw it’s four founders sentenced to a year in jail along with some hefty fines because they were found guilty of profiting from piracy. Ironically on the day their sentence was announced the site was still up.
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The four-men were found guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site. After a 13-day trial, judge Tomas Norström, plus his assistant and three “namndeman” (essentially a jury with extended powers), found ample evidence for a guilty verdict, though no actual files are stored on the Web site.
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It now emerges that judge in the case has now been accused of a conflict of interest because he’s a member of two copyright organizations. If a conflict is proven, then the case will be tried again so I’m interested to see what happens.
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It’s worth pointing out that profiting from piracy and file sharing are two distinctly different things and in a recently conducted audit by the Bay it revealed that nearly 80 percent of tracked content was actually authorized and not copyrighted. Top operator Peter Sunde also noted that the Pirate Bay actually has less pirated content than YouTube which is probably a plausible claim.
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I encourage everyone to support their favorite artists and labels and to buy legal downloads, but I’m not sure how downloading a few Beetles tracks without paying for them is such a bad thing. I know that there’s plenty of underground electronic music being shared illegally too, but you’re not going to find much of it on the Bay.
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Ultimately, file-sharing is here to stay and there’s not much that can be done about it. The large copyright controllerslm and TV studios, and the major labels) will always be a step behind fighting a loosing battle. Like I already said, I don’t think it has too much impact on the niche of electronic music downloads so I’m not too worried about it. In an ideal world everyone would pay for everything they download, but alas, this isn’t an ideal world!
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Tags: File sharing, Piracy