The Pirate Bay Options

[Robert]

For those who download via torrents have probably heard of or even used the website
ThePirateBay.com
It's a torrent site base in Sweden
What you may not have been aware of is the 4 people who operate the site are in court right now for violation of copyrighted laws. The people running the site have always flipped the bird to US and UK companies and their stormtroopers tactics, because unlike the US, the Swedish copyright laws see the difference between a kid downloading a song versus a company selling pirated CD's.
ThePirateBay has a hilarious page on their site documenting all legal threats they have received over the years.
Be sure to read through it when you have some time to kill.
http://thepiratebay.org/legal
One of the best would be from EA Games
http://static.thepiratebay.org/ea_response.txt
I've been known to virtually bitch slap some people over the years but these guys are great.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up is their current legal battle will likely have repercussions throughout the torrent community. So I am happy to report on the very 1st day of court, half of the charges against them have already been dropped.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10165604-38.html

[Robert]

What really drives me nuts is the claim pirating has hurt the industry.
A few years ago, the MPAA claimed illegal downloading was killing the industry.
This claim is what gave justifcation to their stormtrooper tactics.
Yet here, after a huge explosion of P2P sharing an how is the industry.

"For the year, Hollywood revenues continue to climb, with revenue at $1.44 billion, up 22 percent through the same point in 2008. Movie attendance is running 20 percent higher than last year’s"
http://blog.newsok.com/bamsblog/2009/02/16...fice-report-38/

The music industry has seen a big loss but that can be directly attributed to people being able to download the 2 songs they like off an album for $3.00 from any of the legit service like Itunes versus having to pay $15 for the whole album.
Itunes alone recently hit over 1billion songs downloaded and earned around a half billion last year.
Most companies would die for a 30% profit margin like Itunes.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/03/apple-apparentl.html
This biggest failure of the music industry was their own doing. They could have embraced the changes technology brought. Nope what did they do, drag out Lars Ulrich from metallica to cry like a bitch about some 14 year old kid d/l their song. I still don't understand how anyone could care about metallica now.
It's sad how quickly someone can go from bad-ass hard rock musician to whore for the RIAA.

Want to know what's really funny. The RIAA who cried about illegal downloading, have themselves broken the law in multiple states.
Now the people who the RIAA sued, are suing them right back.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20...y-practices.ars