OPINION: Pirates cuffed
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 4/17/2009
APRIL 17 | THE MUSIC AND MOVIE companies scored a major legal victory in the battle against unauthorized file-sharing Friday when a court in Sweden convicted the four founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most widely used BitTorrent tracker sites.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
The four were each sentenced to one year in prison and assessed damages of $3.6 million payable to Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony Music and EMI.
Not that any of those companies are likely to see a dime of that money, of course.
“We can’t pay, and we wouldn’t pay,” one of the four, Peter Sunde, declared at a press conference following the verdict. “Even if I had the money, I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”
Well.
More to the point for the studios and record companies, the monetary damages may not be the only aspect of the verdict that turns out to be more symbolic than effective at halting file-sharing.
On one level, the court handed the media companies a sweeping legal victory, accepting nearly all of their arguments regarding the motives and methods of the defendants.
“By providing a Web site with ... well-developed search functions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the Web site, the accused have incited the crimes that the file-sharers have committed,” the court said in a statement to the media.
The prison sentences were justified, the court added, because of “extensive accessibility of others’ copyrights and the fact that the operation was conducted commercially and in an organized fashion.”
Even so, the verdict did not include an order to shut down the Pirate Bay site.
In part, that was because it was the four founders individually who were on trial, rather than The Pirate Bay itself. But it also would have been futile.
Click here to read the rest of the column at ContentAgenda.com.
