Jodie and Charlotte 30-11-10

Media in the online age

The guardian - Monday 29th November

ISPs must play their part in stamping out piracy -

The Pirate Bay site is still live, showing how toothless piracy convictions are without enforcement by internet service providers

• After Friday's Pirate Bay verdict, the attorney representing the movie companies in the case, Monique Wadsted, told Svenska Dagbladet that she predicts "this sort of piracy will be over in two years time".
• "After this verdict, and when all the pioneers are older with children and a family, this amount of piracy won't exist,"
• So can rights holders breathe a sigh of relief? Does Friday's judgment really spell the beginning of the end of illegal downloading?
• Pirate Bay is still up and running – no one has any idea of who is running it.
• In the past, much of the Swedish media portrayed the Pirate Bay founders as young rebels fighting the corporations in a struggle between "old media" and "new media".
• Of course none of them are kids – they're men in their 30s and 50s who were running an ad-funded business. So they are right, to a certain extent, when they compare themselves to Google.
• Does this mean we should accept that, in practical terms, there are different laws for the internet than for the rest of society?
• This is not just a concern for copyright holders – it also concerns invasion of privacy, libel and many other illegal activities that take place via the internet.
• Internet service providers have to take more responsibility. Once a court has established that a site is committing illegal activities, the ISPs should have a duty to block that site, using technical methods that are similar to those used to protect against viruses, so that it wouldn't be an invasion of personal privacy.

The founders:

• Once the Pirate Bay servers and its co-founders moved abroad – Fredrik Neij lives in Thailand, Peter Sunde in Germany, Carl Lundström in Switzerland and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg in Cambodia – it would've been much more difficult, though not impossible, to bring a case against them.

Comments:

• A lot of the comments on the article think the article is rubbish and that it is the same old argument and piracy will never stop!