As a kid I remember tuning in to pirate radio in the UK. There was something edgy about the two music stations that broadcast from international waters. This week's legal verdict in Sweden about Pirate Bay (the file-sharing site hounded over copyright violations) feels like an echo of the troubled waters in the Irish Sea 30 years back. But anyone with nostalgia should ditch the rose tinted specs: this is an enabler of grand scale piracy.
The decision is part of a pattern of new legal frameworks that are emerging. Kazaa and Grokster have been through a similar process and collectively these will trigger waves of new actions. The fact that 4 directors were jailed for a year will change the markets' and entrepreneurs attitudes to filesharing for sure. Warner, Sony and EMI were among those pushing for the verdict, on the same week they were working with YouTube on a new framework for rights protection at one of the largest content sharing platforms in the world.
The problem comes from the ease of the tech framework for piracy, the marginal cost of each copy being zero and the lack of data trails that show where a copy came from.
The models of Creative Commons and CopyLeft may have suggested new long term models, but the death of copyright has been greatly exaggerated. If copyright falls then part of the software industry falls with, personal data control could follow and an underfunded entertainment industry would see at least part of the media sector implode.
The court's view is telling: this was for "providing a website with ... sophisticated search functions, simple download and storage capabilities, and through the tracker linked to the website." This copyright battle may be won, but the war is far from over and the shape of the post-war settlement opaque at best.
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