Pirate Bay smacked by the Hollywood industry, freeriders join useless political party

Unsurprisingly, the Hollywood industry together with its mighty lobby personnel managed to convince the jury that Pirate Bay is indeed a metropolis of cyber piracy:

The entertainment industry won round one Friday in a legal battle against file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay, with guilty verdicts and one-year prison sentences handed down to four men accused of running and financing the popular site.

All four received one-year terms and were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

"We can't pay and we won't pay," Sunde said in a defiant video clip posted on the Internet. Mockingly, he held up a hand-scribbled "I owe U" note to the camera. "This is as close as you will get to having money from us," Sunde said.

People who suggest this sentence is useless in the war against filesharing are missing the point: this is simply a Broadway show for the entertainment industry. You can compare it with America going into Iraq or Russia bombing Georgia--the message is mostly a symbolic one: "look what we can do with our power," viz.:

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the decision Friday would not result in a “meaningful” decrease in piracy. Internet users are turning to new ways to share music, including streaming and messaging services, which are harder for copyright owners and enforcement officials to detect than downloads.

But he said the ruling was “good p.r.” for the music and movie industries.

“There’s a lot of value out of it, even though its value is not going to be a meaningful reduction in file sharing,” he said. “They have to be seen to be doing something, in the same way that customs fights drug trafficking — as a deterrent.”

Of course it's a PR victory for the industry, which boosts its overall public image by making people recognize they're not going to let anyone organize large-scale piracy without ending up in jail. So, is this a good or a bad thing? I tend to side with neither camp. Of course the industry is using monopoly methods to maintain high prices on pretty worthless products (tell me one excellent movie being made the last 10 years, that is not (a) war propaganda, (b) consumer propaganda, or (c) about how free and Progressive we all are if we just obey the Nanny State). Same goes for games and music.

So we have rich and powerful companies on the one hand who, since they're essentially dealing with commercial products and not valuable culture, are only looking for ways to squeeze maximum cash out of our pockets. On the other hand, we have soft nerds and bored middle class people who actively defend PB and the general practice of downloading large amounts of Hollywood culture. These people are basically freeriders looking for a convenient way to load their computers with commercial culture. No wonder I don't sympathize with either of them. And their political party--please, spare me!

Due to outrage over the verdict in The Pirate Bay trial, the Swedish Pirate Party has gained 3000 members in less than 7 hours. It is now bigger than 3 of the 7 parties represented in the Swedish parliament. 'Ruling means that our political work must now be stepped up. We want to ensure that the Pirate Bay activities — to link people and information — is clearly lawful. And we want to do it for all people in Sweden, Europe and the world, continues Rick Falk Vinge. We want it to be open for ordinary people to disseminate and receive information without fear of imprisonment or astronomical damages.

Yes, we actually have a political party for cyber pirates in Sweden. Along with the bunch of ABBA clones, sleazy 70s porn and welfare madness, I'm ashamed. We are yet again organizing in the name of the common underdog - "oh, pity me, I downloaded 45 extremely crappy movies and now The Man wants to sue me--pirates, unite and rescue!" Can this get any cheesier? Yes, we need to revise our copyright laws, but just because cyber copying is easy, doesn't mean we should abandon copyright altogether, or run artists over, no matter what their salary is.

When theatre drama like this takes place, which is all it is, the public think Big Brother is going to control us all. They've seen too many movies - probably Hollywood movies. Since people don't recognize it's a power statement and not a method of stopping piracy, they draw conclusions like these:

Forbes is running a story discussing the verdict in the Pirate Bay case and its implications on file sharing, specifically with regard to Google. The article points out what most people on Slashdot already realize: Google provides essentially the same service that the Pirate Bay does. The Pirate Bay case may be far from over, accounting for appeals, but the Pirate Bay's assumption of being unchallengeable was shattered. The article raises the question of whether or not Google is untouchable in the matter. The story is quick to point out how the situation resembles a futile game of cat-and-mouse, but given how the Pirate Bay's confidence was ultimately broken, is Google beyond reproach?

Not likely. Yes, I'm also aware of the thousands of blogspot.com sites where people offer free albums. I still don't believe we're all going to become slaves to our ISPs. Some of them, like mine (Bahnhof), are actually pretty sound, and in this case outright defiant:

Broadband operator Bahnhof is continuing to destroy the IP address details of its customers in an open and fully legal bid to undermine Sweden's new anti-file sharing laws.

Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung, a vociferous opponent of the measures that came into force on April 1st, has said he is determined to protect the company's clients.

"It's about the freedom to choose, and the law makes it possible to retain details. We're not acting in breach of IPRED; we're following the law and choosing to destroy the details," Karlung told news agency TT.

Jon is on the right path here: IPRED is going to become yet another ineffective, bureaucratic policy in Sweden, paid by the same people who download the entertainment. The downloaders are bored cyber users who are looking for a way to waste their time, and the industry is a bunch of greedy idiots who don't understand that they need to find new ways of supplying media online to fair prices, and preferably stop promoting even greedier artists in the media, who make the industry look like relentless profiteers (which is probably not far from the truth).

Somali pirates overthrown by NATO, later released because of an impotent West

Just when we thought these really annoying Somali pirates had made their last bargain at sea, NATO flexes its muscles by capturing a bunch of these crooks - only to later release them off-hand:

First, the good news — NATO forces freed 20 hostages from the grips of pirates in the Gulf of Aden. Dutch commandos chased the pirates back to their mother ship, seized the ship, and liberated the hostages. Good for them; job well done.

The commandos briefly detained and questioned the seven gunmen, he told Reuters, but had no legal power to arrest them.

“NATO does not have a detainment policy. The warship must follow its national law,” he said.

That is beyond lameness. As one person commented on Hot Air, "what ever happened to walking the plank?" EU, and increasingly NATO as well, start to look like a bunch of disoriented, fragmented Western pussies. When Somali pirates hi-jack European fishermen out of the blue, we're supposed to go in there and clean out the place, just like Bush did in Iraq after 9/11. Who cares if we're absolutely accurate--it's about flexing muscle. We don't need to occupy any government, we just need to show who's the boss, like we did after WWII.

Russia, China and Venezuela play this game all the time, so why can't we, who still exert a massive world political influence? Because we're a bunch of whiny pussies, unable to reach agreement on what to do with small crooks and mafia empires alike. We need more moral courage. We need strength, pure and simple, and the will to exert it. Yeah, it's forbidden to speak like this today, but who is trying to silence us? Yes, the same people who would like to reduce the West to a rag doll.

My vote: force those people, along with the pirates, to walk the plank. If you dig third world crooks, you end up in the sea together with their friends.