The founders of The Pirate Bay have been arrested, and their servers seized. As you can tell from that link, however, the site is still running, now hosted on a distributed server network, where any one server hub going down will only kill the site for a few minutes. Now that the site is being hosted by a network of users, the tone of the front page has also gotten significantly more…wacky.
With the Pirate Bay facing its strongest challenge yet, its administrators have not stopped rattling their cutlasses.
Mr Warg, in a webcast on Sunday, said: “What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again.
“It has a life without us.”
Mark Mulligan, a digital media analyst and Forrester Research, agreed that even if the Pirate Bay was brought down by the case, the file sharing genie could not be put back in the bottle.
“The industry knows this. But they also know that they need to go through the motions, particularly with the big players. If they don’t, that essentially green lights file sharing.”
He points to previous industry victories against companies like Napster, which shut down the network but didn’t reduce the market.
“After every victory, file sharing has got bigger. I see no reason why the same won’t happen this time.”
The forces of copyright protection are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing for their own interests. They are applying selection pressure to the file sharers, and making them smarter. Instead, they should be changing their business models to work on a premium-value model, where people voluntarily buy, say, their collector’s edition CD sets for the pretty packaging and liner notes and stuff you can’t file share. Instead, they are helping those that will defeat them evolve. At least the best men will win.
Recent Comments