If they're found guilty there'll be an uproar, and the Swedish authorities and judges know they're being watched closely by an international community.

Do the Swedish authorities particularly care if a group of people who they consider to be criminals and pirates don't like them? I doubt it.

When the Pirate Bay's servers were raided a few years ago it turned into a political scandal, and (if I remember correctly) a minister was fired.

Also, The Pirate Party was very close to getting elected into parlaiment at the last election in Sweden.

If I was a Swedish politician or authority I would definitely care.

Courts really shouldn't worry about public reaction. That's the job of lawmakers.

(http://thepiratebay.org/blog/102 , it only took a few seconds to find, and bests AFAIK-ing)

Fairly certain that the servers are not in the Sainai :)

Also they claim to have Fibre connections to XYZ countries? hmmm. (bearing in mind that that kind of thing leaves a paper trail and there doesnt appear to be one) Smacks a little too much of irony to me :)

I almost wish they had managed to buy seaworld too because it would have been amusing to see the Music moguls trying to get at them there :D

If they hosted it in Sinai, then "actually" it stills in Asia, not Africa! Sinai is the only part in Egypt that belongs to Asia... I am from Egypt and I know it.

I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech (especially for movies). And the argument with "trying stuff out", does not really hold - you don't go and try an ice cream for free, you buy it and if it's bad you don't buy ice creams from that store any longer.

It isn't really the end user's responsibility to fix a broken business model. I agree with you that it's problematic but trying to infringe upon the public's demand to copy with suing/drm/fear hasn't really done much to stem the tide of copying. And at this point it all just feels like a lack of creativity - charge everyone a yearly subscription fee to a site that allows you to download anything for free at high quality/speeds. That's just one idea off the top of my head; get 30 smart people in a room for a week and I'm sure they could come up with tons of viable alternatives.

I have 100 times more hard drive space and 400 times the bandwidth than I did a decade ago. In another decade, I'll have 100TB of space and 8Gbps of bandwidth, probably all on my cell phone. Not only does this make movies ridiculously easy to download and store, but all those slow, distributed anonymous P2P networks we have today start to look like feasible way of downloading files.

Hollywood face an enemy of exponentially increasing resilience. They can either attempt to come to an understanding now when they have a good hand, or wait until they have no choice but to bargain from a position of weakness.

When you taste the ice cream, you get the full essence of it. All the subsequent bites will taste like that one. You know what you are getting.

When you hear a 30 second song clip or see a movie trailer, you get a selectively packaged subset of the full product. I have heard many clips and seen many trailers that are simply awesome, and then the actual song or movie ends up being terrible.

So the analogy would be better if you got to hear the song once for free, and then had to buy to own, which is kind of between the two extremes now (leech it or buy it unheard). Radio (traditional or internet-based) does a decent job of this now, but only for singles. There is still no way to try a whole album before buying unless you catch it on the headphones in Best Buy.

The trouble with movies is that generally you don't watch them many times. I can't really speak for everyone there, but I know I would be much more willing to pay for movies if I could get a good 720p copy of it for say $10-15. The reason I don't buy movies now is that I don't want a pile of DVDs in my tiny apartment. I could buy them, rip them, then resell them, but as I understand it, this is just as illegal as downloading them to begin with. So to summarize, give us some format options besides just a DVD that costs $23.

There was no obligation to "try-before-buy" policies handed down to sellers of wares by Moses, you know.

I fail to understand how paying for the music that you listen to is a sub-optimal arrangement. All this talk about obsolete business model is just bullshit. If you dig underneath all the "freedom" hyperbole and "fat-cat record companies" self-righteous finger-wagging, what you really have is desire to rationalize behaviour whose analogue in the real world nobody has any difficulty whatsoever to see as stealing.

These self-described pirates deserve nothing less than jail. I say that as a musician who in an ideal world would find record companies that can finance producing or promoting an album, and instead finds a record industry hollowed out by a 50% decline in revenue within a decade. How does the idiotic "expert" professor for the defense explain that figure in the context of massively more pervasive access to music? It just doesn't compute. People are stealing music. Period. We need to stop it, so that the whole ecosystem of jobs related to music (most of these are not fat cats. People like mixing and mastering engineers, session musicians etc) is allowed to flourish. It's currently the case that a lot of the talent in mastering, for example, is being lost. Simply because it's too expensive to have it done by these people now idea. Result: over-compressed albums with totally fake dynamics. I'm an example: I'm a programmer, who would really love to be able to do music. But I don't really want to live on a tour bus the rest of my life. Now, ten years ago, you could go the Steely Dan way and just record studio albums; no touring. That approach simply doesn't work now, and inevitably that means that some real talent is not coming through; the incentives simply aren't there.

Really? I hope production costs keep falling as rapidly as they have been. If more people produce great content that doesn't cost millions of dollars to make, we all win.

Whoever wins this trial, P2P filesharing is unlikely to go away. So I think filesharing will have a number of effects:

Movies and games will get cheaper to produce

People will make less financially ambitious movies and games

Some movies and games will be funded by varients of the Street Performer Protocol -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol

Some movies or games will be funded by the state. Organisations such as the BBC do this today. Possibly there will be a broadband tax to fund the creation of downloadable works, along the lines of this proposal: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...

You a) don't seem to be following the case, where the people running it credibly claim to be pretty much broke, b) don't seem to know much about such websites - they're almost universally giant money sinks.

1) Check http://i40.tinypic.com/hv77kx.jpg for reference

What is the equivalent on something like the pirate bay? "Buy the movie from amazon"? I'm skeptical you'd get anywhere near the same revenue. People go to somewhere like the pirate bay for a specific reason - to get a specific file.

This is a classic case where the misbehavior of one segment of the population (in this case quite a large segment) could make stricter legislation necessary. I think that real world traffic laws are a good analogy here:

Most people are violating speed limits, and speeding in moderation is socially acceptable. Compare moderate speeding to moderate file sharing, i.e. sharing files with say only 10 of your best acquaintances. Legislation would not be required. However, gross violation of speed limits by a certain group of drivers brought us the traffic police and radar controls. I hope that the gross copyright violations of a certain group of people do not ruin the Internet for everyone.

you can make almost any point on hacker news and get away with it, if you're respectful to all involved.

pg started this site, and he has inculcated it with his values. imagine pg writing an essay about the pirate bay. do you suppose he would call them "idiots?"

like it or not, the culture around these parts tends towards respect. you violate local customs at your own peril.

Intelligent discourse is based on good arguments and respect for the other party.

(for the record I think I did back up my statement: they are idiots because they are helping and encouraging people the steal with no thought as to the consequences and believe they are above the law to the point of being. And, importantly, refuse to be reasoned with - and yes I have tried.)

I agree with the good arguments - but respect should not be automatic. I would look for it to be earned in an argument (probably I did not do much to earn any yesterday). My other point, of course, is that TPB (at whom my remark was directed) are not here and so are not one of the debating parties... :)

EDIT: I am not particularly worried by the downmods. People can express their opinions. However downmodding based on wording feels a bit short sighted... downmodding based on percieved bias (which a friend of mine pointed out) I would agree with (because it did introduce a bias.. which was a mistake).

(Also it's a bit sad to see this bumped up to the first page... this surely is stuff for the "back room")

I'm interested to hear what you believe the endgame for copyright is, given that you think that those currently ignoring copyright are in the wrong, but that Apple, et al, should go non-DRM? I'm against copyright, and I dislike DRM, but I don't have anything in principle against DRM, as I do against copyright.

In the face of that could we expect media companies to be reasonable and sit at the table to work out new ways to provide access to digital media/software? This is not a 2 sided battle in my eyes. TPB are as much an enemy to the consumer as the IPFI.

And why shouldnt the sharers get some fear? Perhaps it will dissuade them from sharing. Bearing in mind I am massivley pro copyright (as a software developer and writer - even though the majority of my work is open source).

In terms of copyright - I too am not too worried by DRM. I would like to see DRM dropped but can understand why it is there. In the Apple case they had to impose stupidly strict DRM just to get the store off the ground. The fact they can now release that music more freely is a testamount to how much the music companies are starting to come round to the consumers viewpoint. I am never one to blame the music companies for wanting to protect their material: even though I do disagree with the prices they charge, how they screw over the artists and how they insist (till now) on locking stuff up in super restrictive DRM.

I never fully understood the arguments against copyright. Care to explain?

There are several arguments against copyright, but the one I like most is this: property is necessary because two people cannot both (exclusively) use the same property at the same time. The idea of property solves this, and everyone can agree that that is yours while this is mine. The nature of things is that they can't be available for the exclusive use of two or more people. Ideas (copyright and patents, at least; trademarks are less clear) can be used by more than one person without any impact on others using it: everyone can exclusively use an idea at the same time. The reason for this is that "an idea" isn't a thing at all, but a category of things -- a description of a group, each instance of which is owned by virtue of someone owning the physical thing that instantiates it.

In summary: I don't believe in ownership of categories of things, only things themselves.

If you look at the origins of copyright, even its supporters didn't believe it was real property; it was purely a utilitarian attempt to encourage production of ideas by extending an analogy of property to idea production, for a limited time. There are still reasonable arguments to be made about whether it's an net economic win or lose for a legal system to include copyright and patent, and other people can argue that point better than I.

As for economics, I'd guess it's a loss. Copyright and patent are state subsidies for speech and technology. But while you generally do get more of something you subsidize, it's always at a greater cost elsewhere in one's economy.

If you have an idea you have to take steps to protect it. If you create a working product based on the idea that specific design is protected by a modicum of copyright.

I do see where you are coming from with the ideas thing (the free-software side of me wants me to agree fully that ideas/processes should never be protected).

(this is in the UK of course: in the US things might be different)

If I create a product -- say, a book I write in longhand with pen on paper -- the product is covered by existing law without copyright. That physical book is mine to do with as I please, assuming I owned the raw materials in the first place. At this point, copyright isn't needed: I could contract with those I allow to read or copy this book. Where copyright comes in is in asserting a right to prevent copying over other physical books which are sufficiently similar to the one I just wrote. I'd be asserting a right to control an entire category of physical objects, rather than specific objects. I think the burden of proof is on those who want to extend property rights to categories of things, as an analogy with property rights in things. I used to use an example wherein I pointed to the absurdity of a car manufacturer asserting a right to all photos of their cars, but some car manufacturer actually did that without widespread derision recently.

About ideas/processes: if processes can't be protected, then what about a process which, followed strictly, produces a copyrighted work? Aren't copyright and patent isomorphic in this way?

Yeh I am fairly certain in the UK that wuold not stand up. Certainly it doesnt fall under copyright.

What happens when you write a book and ask people for money to read it (unless we are arguing that everything should be free :)) and then someone else copies your book and sells it slightly cheaper than you. Should we not have protective laws to stop that occuring?

I think copyright is being confused here. With the similarity aspect we are talking intellectual property not copyright. Copyrightr (In the UK) applies simply to direct copies or derivative works (in your example if someone copied my book but added a new ending and a few new chapters).

If someone rewrites your entire plot without using any of your text they are fine (and the 2 works will stand and fall on their relative merits). But if you tried to write a book about Harry Potter the Wizard you would probably run into trobule - because the name has (I believe) been trade marked in that context (I could be wrong - but it is a dramatic example).