America pushes epic fail in Sweden

[mountainmage]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial

These guys, who are doing the world a great service, have been sent to jail for a year. The greedy copyright holders have again proved they're scared shitless of losing money to pirating. Truly a sad day for freedom.

[Sahan]

I hadn't heard anything about this trial. I'm not use where my stance is with pirates. It's like hackers I guess, once upon a time they were considered in some circles to be defenders of freedom, but now they're just scammers after your money. Piracy can be, though currently is not, extremely destructive.

Word of advice: Pirate Bay should totally have moved to Somalia, eh?

[mountainmage]

Piracy can be destructive when people sell bootleg copies, right? China thrives on that shit.

[Cirtur]

Will the website be taken down? It was a very convenient way of finding torrents and I'll be sad if it is.

[mountainmage]

I don't think that was included in the terms of their sentence. It's still up as of today.

[Cirtur]

Maybe I should have donated more.

[Lethal Interjection]

Wait... Does Pirate Bay actually host the torrents? Hasn't it just created a forum to share said files? I mean, if they have been put in jail for having a site that searches and compiles the links to the files, shouldn't the inventors of the internet (Al Gore) be just as much to blame? I mean, the internet is the reason for this type of piracy in the first place.
Should google get in trouble if I start searching for torrents using it?
Too bad, though.

[Oldrac the Chitinous]

First global warming, now internet piracy?
Al Gore is a menace.

[Cirtur]

They did use the google argument in their defense, however the court was very much stacked against them.

And of course there is always appeals...

[AHMETxRock]

It's the old versus the new. How did we settle this before our international courts?

Oh yeah. We burn the mutha F***in building to the ground. The old dies away, and becomes fertilizer for the new.
Competition is the idea, isn't it? If something else comes out that appeals far more then your product, you simply lose out.
Then again, what if people could get free HD print-outs from an off-hand source that merely copied Zach's files?
Would we be willing to give away our earnings so others may have that freedom.

So yeah, in a nutshell, whatever benefits ourselves and those that further our benefit are the only ones that matter. I don't download any files of any sort knowing I violate someone's rights to the said property. I have played roms, listened to music on iPods, and other various crap like that, but I've never stolen anything. If there is a tree with peaches growing randomly in a field, I don't think it is wrong to eat it. If the said tree were within a fenced area, or in an orchard, I would not take it.

[smiley_cow]

I heard about this a few days ago, but I didn't think they'd actually lose. I mean they just linked to other people who were doing the actual pirating. And torrents can be used for any sort of file sharing, not just pirated material. I think this may be a sign that corporations have way too much power.

[LordRetard]

There are generally two situations that a victim of piracy can be in.

1. No one knows you and no one will listen to your shit. Therefore, you're actually receiving publicity for this, and will sell more records.
2. You're rich! Who gives a damn!?

Altogether this is all just a "putting price on information" thing, because it doesn't occupy physical space. And intellectual property is big in the states, because you can make a lot of money that way. I still think it's ridiculous, it's not as if any of this actually exists.

Plus, stopping the Pirate Bay does nothing because all they do is offer links to torrents, they don't actually carry the files themselves.

[Cirtur]

It's inconvenient for me. Now I have to go on filesharing forums or something when all I want is a nice simple search engine for torrents.

[Oldrac the Chitinous]

Or use one of the 10^17 other nice simple search engines for torrents.

[Cirtur]

But...but I like brand name torrent searchers.