The Noble Lie

In the midst of news about clashes with Somali pirates, the music and film industry finally got to sink their teeth into the folks from the Pirate Bay file sharing site, to the tune of 3.6 million US dollars and four 1-year jail sentences, using new (I believe) Swedish anti-piracy laws.

The music and film industry has been waging this battle for a while, which has included unsuccessful litigation attempts and police raids. Half the charges were dropped on the second day of the trial due to the prosecution’s lack of understanding of how file sharing works.

The future of the file sharing site, the most popular on the internet with as many users as the incredibly popular World of Warcraft game, is uncertain. The future of the BitTorrent file sharing protocol is on shaky ground as well, unless you count Linux distributions, or the fact that the aforementioned World of Warcraft uses the protocol to distribute patches and updates. Of course, before Pirate Bay, there was Kazaa, which got shut down. Before Kazaa, there was Napster, which got shut down. Notice the pattern? There will be another, and it will be harder to shut down and more efficient at sharing files.

This doesn’t impact me because I gave the finger to the music and film industry a while ago, and am no longer interested in their products, for free or for $$$.

Related

• Open Government?
• Big Trouble in Cyber China
• Smart Guns around the corner
• California’s Smart Gun Law
• Big Dog, he’s iron tough

Tags: Tech

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 3:36 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.