… hvilket der er en masse at sige om.
Som ofte påpeget har The Pirate Bay som “piratside” lige så meget været en politisk aktion som en side af praktisk betydning, eftersom det vrimler med andre og mindst lige så gode hjemsteder for torrents af vekslende lovlighed.
Så hvad er betydningen af denne afgørelse? Vil Pirate Bay forsvinde, og hvis den gør, betyder det noget, og hvad vil komme i stedet? Vi giver ordet til Cory Doctorow på Boing Boing:
After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it’s certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course — just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more “moderate” services.
With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).
It’s a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that’s dedicated to their destruction.
Slippe af med downloads og fildeling kan man ikke – ånden kan ikke puttes tilbage i flasken igen, så lidt som man i 70erne kunne forhindre folk i at kopiere musik fra plader og over på kasettebånd. Kopiering er billig i den digitale alder, og befolkningens retsfølelse har endegyldigt flyttet sig i retning af, at fildeling er OK. Det bedste, industrien kan gøre, er at opdatere deres forretningsmodeller.
I mellemtiden må vi jo tage bestik af dommens indhold og dens mulige konsekvenser:
One of the defendants, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, admitted that Pirate Bay had lost its case.
“Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so
ever. This is just a theatre for the media,” he said.
“Really, it’s a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”
The trial began on 16 February in Stockholm district court, when the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Fredik Neij, Carl Lundstrom, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Kolmisoppi, were put in the dock on charges of assisting copyright infringement.
The Pirate Bay does not itself host audio and video files, but provides links to torrents hosted elsewhere on the internet.
Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as
rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.
Prosecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.
The trial has further polarised the tech community and the music industry with both sides eagerly awaiting the result, which will be regarded as a precedent for future filesharing cases.
Link: The Pirate Bay trial: guilty verdict
